title: Out of memory or dimension too large for Octave's index type (reading xlsx file)
body: <p>I tried to read from an excel .xlsx file containing 3000 rows and about 800 columns using Octave xlsread (using Octave GNU package) on Windows. The file contains very large integers. The highest is 10^32. The total size of the excel file is 17732KB. The .xlsx file I am trying to read is here: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9_0IQ9zpJH2SzVKTHVqSW5qN0U/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9_0IQ9zpJH2SzVKTHVqSW5qN0U/view?usp=sharing</a> </p>
  
  <p>This is the error I have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>error: out of memory or dimension too large for Octave's index type
  error: called from
      __OCT_spsh_open__ at line 95 column 11
      xlsopen at line 314 column 30
      xlsread at line 197 column 11
      getExcelData at line 5 column 18
      start at line 18 column 6
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I debugged xlsopen does not return any value (so it couldn't read). I was wondering whether there is a way to solve this problem? Or is there a better way to read large excel data using Octave? Or is there a way to increase Octave's memory.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I tried reading with 200 rows instead of 3000 rows and apparently it worked. But the problem is still I want to read and process all 3000 rows. Sometimes when I try to process 200 rows, the error is still printed out at various part of the application:</p>
  
  <pre><code>error: out of memory or dimension too large for Octave's index type
  </code></pre>