>>> The Obama administration didn't want to release lists of visitors to the White House at first, but it eventually relented to outside pressure.

In a transparency-not-transparency move, the Obama White House kept adding its visitor logs to the same spreadsheet file, instead of releasing separate files covering certain time periods. That spreadsheet eventually grew gargantuan. When last updated at the end of 2016, it had become 1.1 gigabytes with 6 million rows. This is a big problem.

The most popular spreadsheet software - Excel, a part of Microsoft Office - maxes out at just over a million rows. Word won't even try to open a file over 500 megs. And even if you had willing software, it's unlikely that a typical computer can handle the job. What good is an important historical record that almost no one can open?

A tech-minded friend of The Memory Hole 2 helped me make the files accessible. First, the rows were ordered by date - March 2010 through December 2016 - and the file was divided into six smaller files covering about one year apiece.

Then the original mega-spreadsheet was ordered by last name of visitor and was again split into six files.

To the right, you'll find links to all three iterations of the visitor logs.

The Visitor Logs

  • The original spreadsheet (1.1 gigs; ~6,000,000 rows) is at the official archive of the Obama White House website here. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has a copy here.
     
  • I've posted the six smaller spreadsheets ordered by date here.
     
  • The six spreadsheets ordered by visitor surname are here.

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