Why is there still a row limit in Microsoft Excel

Question

Until Office 2007  Excel has a maximum of 65 000 rows  Office 2007 bumped that up to a max of 1 million rows  which is nicer of course  but I m curious -- why is there a limit at all  Obviously  performance will slow down exponetially as you increase the spreadsheet size  but it shouldn t be very hard to have Excel optimize for that by starting with a small sheet and dynamically  re-sizing  it only as needed      Given how much work it must have been to increase the limit from 65K to 1 million  why didn t they go all the way so it s limited only by the amount of available memory and disk space

User · Accepted Answer

Probably because of optimizations  Excel 2007 can have a maximum of 16  384 columns and 1  048  576 rows  Strange numbers  14 bits   16  384  20 bits   1  048  576 14   20   34 bits   more than one 32 bit register can hold  But they also need to store the format of the cell  text  number etc  and formatting  colors  borders etc   Assuming they use two 32-bit words  64 bit  they use 34 bits for the cell number and have 30 bits for other things  Why is that important  In memory they don t need to allocate all the memory needed for the whole spreadsheet but only the memory necessary for your data  and every data is tagged with in what cell it is supposed to be in  Update 2016  Found a link to Microsoft s specification for Excel 2013  amp  2016  Open workbooks  Limited by available memory and system resources Worksheet size  1 048 576 rows  20 bits  by 16 384 columns  14 bits  Column width  255 characters  8 bits  Row height  409 points Page breaks  1 026 horizontal and vertical  unexpected number  probably wrong  10 bits is 1024  Total number of characters that a cell can contain  32 767 characters  signed 16 bits  Characters in a header or footer  255  8 bits  Sheets in a workbook  Limited by available memory  default is 1 sheet  Colors in a workbook  16 million colors  32 bit with full access to 24 bit color spectrum  Named views in a workbook  Limited by available memory Unique cell formats cell styles  64 000  16 bits   65536  Fill styles  256  8 bits  Line weight and styles  256  8 bits  Unique font types  1 024  10 bits  global fonts available for use  512 per workbook Number formats in a workbook  Between 200 and 250  depending on the language version of Excel that you have installed Names in a workbook  Limited by available memory Windows in a workbook  Limited by available memory Hyperlinks in a worksheet  66 530 hyperlinks  unexpected number  probably wrong  16 bits   65536  Panes in a window  4 Linked sheets  Limited by available memory Scenarios  Limited by available memory  a summary report shows only the first 251 scenarios Changing cells in a scenario  32 Adjustable cells in Solver  200 Custom functions  Limited by available memory Zoom range  10 percent to 400 percent Reports  Limited by available memory Sort references  64 in a single sort  unlimited when using sequential sorts Undo levels  100 Fields in a data form  32 Workbook parameters  255 parameters per workbook Items displayed in filter drop-down lists  10 000

User · Answer

In a word - speed   An index for up to a million rows fits in a 32-bit word  so it can be used efficiently on 32-bit processors   Function arguments that fit in a CPU register are extremely efficient  while ones that are larger require accessing memory on each function call  a far slower operation   Updating a spreadsheet can be an intensive operation involving many cell references  so speed is important   Besides  the Excel team expects that anyone dealing with more than a million rows will be using a database rather than a spreadsheet

[excel] Why is there still a row limit in Microsoft Excel?

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