streaming through a table, but don't stream the row le

All, 

I might be missing something 

An XML serialisation of an excel sheet just exploded into 1.4 GByte 
I have an XSLT that works on smaller subsets that I now want to apply on the big file 
and if possible, I would prefer to not change all of my functions and templates (that work on the row level) in to streaming mode 
Is there a way to process the table in streaming mode, but just process the rows without caring about streaming there? 

Thanks 

Geert