Why haven’t Excel’s limits budged over the years?
Excel has limits — plenty of them. Whether it’s the number of worksheet rows, characters in a cell, or the percentage you can zoom in. We’ve all bumped into a limit of some type at some point.
There’s a useful Microsoft webpage that lists all of Excel’s specifications and limits.
Three tabs cover every Excel edition over the past 17 years: ‘Newer versions’, ‘Office 2010’, and ‘Office 2007’.
Each contains five tables breaking down the types of specifications and limits.
You might be surprised that nothing has really changed. In fact, ignoring any additional rows a table has, these are the only differences:
Worksheet and workbook specifications and limits
Sheets in a workbook
- Newer versions: default is 1 sheet
- Office 2010: default is 3 sheets
- Office 2007: default is 3 sheets
Charting specifications and limits
Data points in a data series for 2-D charts
- Newer versions: Limited by available memory
- Office 2010: Limited by available memory
- Office 2007: 32,000
Data points in a data series for 3-D charts
- Newer versions: Limited by available memory
- Office 2010: Limited by available memory
- Office 2007: 4,000
Data points for all data series in one chart
- Newer versions: Limited by available memory
- Office 2010: Limited by available memory
- Office 2007: 256,000
That’s it!
Some of these and other limits may seem arbitrary, but there’s a good reason behind them.
Take character length, for example. The default is 32,767, a figure that pops up a few times.
This is the upper limit of a 16-bit signed integer, ranging from -32,768 to 32,767. An unsigned 16-bit integer has a range of 0 to 65,535.
Rick Hitchcock on Stack Overflow elaborates on this:
“Since it’s impossible for a cell to have a negative number of characters, it seems odd that Microsoft would limit a cell’s length based on a signed rather than unsigned 16-bit integer. When they wrote the original program, they probably couldn’t imagine anyone storing so much information in a single cell.”
He goes on to say:
“Microsoft may have kept the 32767 limit to maintain backward compatibility with previous versions of Excel. However, that doesn’t really make sense, because the row and column counts greatly increased in recent versions of Excel, making large spreadsheets incompatible with previous versions.”
The question is, how hard would it be to bump up this limit? Given how difficult other seemingly simple upgrades have turned out, it’d probably be more effort than it’s worth.
Nevertheless, people do all kinds of crazy stuff in Excel, and having more features that are ‘Limited by available memory’ would allow us to take advantage of modern computational power, which is clearly a lot greater than 20 years ago.
