My bad, you're right. There are a lot of cells available. But only 1
million rows and 16 k columns. As I said, I'd be happy with the number
of cells available if I could use them in whatever arrangement of rows
and columns I need. But that's not the case. If the data is arranged
with many columns and few rows (as an example, my spreadsheet with 25
rows and 200 k columns) won't fit. I can import it piecemeal into
multiple sheets but it's a pain to import and use that way. Or I can
transpose it prior to import but that may not necessarily be possible
depending on the source of the data. Depending on the arrangement of
rows and columns, it might simply be impossible to import the data
into a single sheet even though the actual amount of data is far below
the limit of the sheet and Windows memory limitations...

Thanks.


On Jul 23, 4:24*pm, Gord Dibben <gorddibbATshawDOTca wrote:
Re-do your math............................

If using Excel 2007( I think you are) you have about 16.5 BILLION cells per
worksheet.

That should do you.

Gord Dibben *MS Excel MVP

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:25:31 -0700 (PDT), T Magritte

wrote:
I have some rather large spreadsheets that are difficult or impossible
to import into Excel.

As an example, I have one with 25 rows and around 200,000 columns.
When I attempt to import into Excel I get this error:

"- Excel cannot exceed the limit of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.
- By default, Excel places three worksheets in a workbook file. Each
worksheet can contain 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns of data, and
workbooks can contain more than three worksheets if your computer has
enough memory to support the additional data."

So why am I allowed to have so many more rows than columns? Why not
limit the size by number of cells rather than an arbitrary number? I
can transpose the data in the originating application to make it fit
Excel's limiations, at least in the case.

Also, it seems like there isn't actually a limit on the amount of data
a workbook can have since you can have about 16 million cells per
sheet but as many sheets as you want (I assume there's some other
limit on number of sheets). So why can't I have a single sheet with 32
million cells rather than 2 sheets with 16 million cells?

Seems if Microsoft were going to the trouble of increasing the
allowable size of spreadsheets, why not make them unrestricted in
size?

Sorry, end of rant...

(yes, I should probably be using Access or mysql or something designed
for large datasets, but sometimes Excel is very nice for quick and
dirty stuff. Access has a horrible import filter anyway, so datasets
with many columns can't be imported even if Access itself were capable
of managing he data. I haven't tried any mysql solutions yet.)