Did you know that Excel has a maximum number of rows and maximum number of columns?
So, lets get the numbers out of the way:
Excel 2003: Max Rows: 65,536 Max Columns: 256
Excel 2007: Max Rows: 1,048,576 Max Columns: 16,384
That makes 16,777,216 cells per page in Excel 2003. This is increased to a whopping 17,179,869,184 (about 17 billion). So, we can fit 1,024 sheets of Excel 2003 data into one sheet of Excel 2007. Although at first one may think that it is good to have that much room to work. Fitting all of your data on one sheet may sound fantastic. But I’m sure that there are those of you out there who remember not having much room to work in, and the benefits of that restriction.
When there isn’t much room, we must always ask ourselves if we are approaching a problem the right way. Are we not cleaning up after ourselves? When everything fits in a smaller space, we can notice when things change. When these limitations are removed, we are not forced to keep things tidy. When there is old data, we can leave it where it was, and start the new data next to the old. That way we can reference the old data. When we are trying to design that Array Formula just so, we can leave old copies around so that we know what not to do, right? That’s a trap that is just too easy to fall into. There is a need to keep the data in check. To throw out the old data. Save it in an old workbook. Start fresh, and work carefully. But enough of the soap box.
Imagine now, a screen of about 50 by 20, we can look at 1000 cells at time, with the normal zoom. That means, without some tool to help you, to look at the whole sheet you would have to look through 17 million screens of data. Don’t even think about printing it out! Imagine trying to read a book with 17 million pages. I know that I wouldn’t even try to read that one cover to cover.
While you and I both know that much of that (we hope) is blank, but without a tool to show you where to look, it may still take weeks to look at the non-blank sections.
So, consider using a good tool such as RedRover Audit, or RedRover Detect. These tools help you to understand your spreadsheets, save you time reviewing and navigating your spreadsheets, and increase your confidence in your spreadsheets before you share them.
Posted by: Dan Vega, Software Engineer, RedRover Software Inc
