Open Office Calc == MS Excel ?

I was helping a colleague to analyse and present the Cisco firewall rules using a Apache, CGI and shell script. Another colleague was telling me that I can use MS Excel to do similar things and he showed me a few tricks which are damn useful. He also highlighted to me that MS Excel has a limitation of max of 65536 rows. During our discussion, we are wondering whether Open Office Calc is better than Excel in this aspect. Now, I am going to undercover the truth ...

I generated 70,000 CSV records with 3 fields in each record using awk. This CSV file will be imported into MS Excel and Open Office.

awk '
BEGIN {
  OFS=","
}
END {
  for(i=1;i<=70000;++i) {
    print i,i+1,i+2
  }
}' /dev/null > 70k.csv

Below are the screen dumps for both applications in importing the 70k.csv file. To my disappointment, OO Calc (my version is 2.0.2) has the same limitation as MS Excel.

MS Excel error in loading 70,000 records

MS Excel can only load 65536 records

OO error in loading 70,000 records

OO can only load 65536 records