Basic tools to use when new

Giving back a good tip, fellow BHWers.
If you don't know how to use skype and Ecel, learn them.
For one thing Almost all big websites, the admins, the sales guys use Skype. You will look stupid if you tell them you don't have a Skype account. Trust me, I didn't have it and probably lost out on some good contacts that I could have made. I didn't have it. So lesson one.
Now other thing is data dumps form major website are in ? Yeah, Excel or if you are to poor, Apache Open Office. It's a bitch, coming from a trade background, with little office experience to open Excel...
It's one of those WTF moments the first time you open it.
So don't be me. learn it, or at least learn how to manipulate the data, so you can get the damn links for the damn thumbnails installed to your site.
I still haven't figured it out. But I'm working on it. Big data porn dumps, like 8.9 gb. Please advise
on how to get that thing opened, if anybody bothers to read this post. I still can't get it open.
Don't have the site ready for it, but maybe in a month or two, if I don't die from this information/learning overload, then I'll need to get it open.

OpenOffice can't handle a file of that size, hence why it is crashing. You can split the file into many smaller ones so that OpenOffice can handle it. There's definitely freeware available that will do that. Or you can use something like SQL to manipulate data, though I have no experience with that, and you'd probably need to hire someone.