Increase the capacity of an Excel spreadsheet

I use Excel extensively for performance analysis and have a fairly complex
integration of different spreadsheets in different workbooks. I have found
that there is a physical limitation to the number of cells that I can use in
any one spreadsheet (seems to be about 67,010). Does anyone know how this
limitation can either be removed or increased?

The current limitations are 65536 rows and 256 columns.

These limitation are removed in Excel (office) 2007 ( 1 milion rows/64K
columns I think) which is currently in beta test. You can download the beta
from the Microsoft site.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/prev...etthebeta.mspx

"StevefromAGINT" wrote:

> I use Excel extensively for performance analysis and have a fairly complex
> integration of different spreadsheets in different workbooks. I have found
> that there is a physical limitation to the number of cells that I can use in
> any one spreadsheet (seems to be about 67,010). Does anyone know how this
> limitation can either be removed or increased?

Steve

65536 is the limit in XL97 - 2003 with no increase possible. This will be
increased in XL2007 to 1048576.

I however fail to see what a grid of this size does for Excel, particularly
as the slower functions are added. (SUMIF, VLOOKUP, IF, etc).

Generally this is a database job which can hold data far more efficiently in
a normalised, relational state, with Excel being used to calculate summary
portions as a front end

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
[email protected]HIS


"StevefromAGINT" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>I use Excel extensively for performance analysis and have a fairly complex
> integration of different spreadsheets in different workbooks. I have
> found
> that there is a physical limitation to the number of cells that I can use
> in
> any one spreadsheet (seems to be about 67,010). Does anyone know how this
> limitation can either be removed or increased?

Thanks for the advice but my problem is not the capacity of the spreadsheet,
but the number of usable cells. While there is a theoretical maximum of
65536 rows x 256 columns (16,777,216 cells) I can only seem to be able to use
about 67,010 as a maximum (Excel 2003 does not allow any other cells to be
populated after that).

If you've got any advice I would really appreciate it (I'm investigating an
SQL DB so this problem is probably only going to be short-term [up to six
months]).

"StevefromAGINT" wrote:

> I use Excel extensively for performance analysis and have a fairly complex
> integration of different spreadsheets in different workbooks. I have found
> that there is a physical limitation to the number of cells that I can use in
> any one spreadsheet (seems to be about 67,010). Does anyone know how this
> limitation can either be removed or increased?

Steve

There is no 'logical' reason why you can only use some of the cells in the
smaller grid. (The larger one is a different matter) unless you have a very
small amount of memory.

What error are you getting?

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
[email protected]HIS


"StevefromAGINT" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Thanks for the advice but my problem is not the capacity of the
> spreadsheet,
> but the number of usable cells. While there is a theoretical maximum of
> 65536 rows x 256 columns (16,777,216 cells) I can only seem to be able to
> use
> about 67,010 as a maximum (Excel 2003 does not allow any other cells to be
> populated after that).
>
> If you've got any advice I would really appreciate it (I'm investigating
> an
> SQL DB so this problem is probably only going to be short-term [up to six
> months]).
>
> "StevefromAGINT" wrote:
>
>> I use Excel extensively for performance analysis and have a fairly
>> complex
>> integration of different spreadsheets in different workbooks. I have
>> found
>> that there is a physical limitation to the number of cells that I can use
>> in
>> any one spreadsheet (seems to be about 67,010). Does anyone know how
>> this
>> limitation can either be removed or increased?