According to Microsoft support 2021, Excel rows have a limit of 1,048,576. This means that there is limited memory for every workbook to function well. The row limit can be affected, especially if the data you want to enter is more than 1,048,576. Some rows can also be excess, hence, there is need to reduce them. This is possible by deleting some cells or hiding them.
Why Excel has Row Limit
1. Optimization
Excel uses locally generated resources, not resources from the cloud. The application handles only a small amount of data generated by humans. It is limited to the large worksheets from machine logs. Once you exceed the number of rows, the application performance becomes really slow.
2. General Use
The primary purpose of excel was for general analysis. Over the years, excel has improved, and you can now use it for any research. Excel is built to handle all cases of analysis, from financial and statistical to project management.
3. Excel is not a database.
Although excel offers many database-like characteristics, it is not an actual database. That is why Microsoft has other databases like SQL Server or Access to handle the analysis of large amounts of data.
The rows in excel may be too much for you. There are ways you can reduce this number to what you want. You can either hide the rows you don’t want to show, or you can limit the scrolling area.
Hide Rows You Don’t want to show.
In a case where you don’t want to leave unnecessary rows, you can hide them. Follow the steps to guide you on how to hide these unwanted rows.
1. Select and highlight the rows you want to hide.
2. Right-click on the highlighted rows.
3. Click on the “hide option”.
4. Click “OK”.
Always note that the rows that are hidden you can unhide.
Limiting the Scrolling Area
When working with excel, you may want to restrict scrolling the worksheet. Here are the steps to limit the scrolling area,
1. Select and activate the worksheet you want to limit the scroll area.
2. Hold the “ALT + F11” keys in order to open the Visual Basic for Application and click the “view> properties window option”.
3. On the properties window option, click on the “range address” in the scroll area property box.
4. Close the window, and you will have restricted any movement in any cells outside the range you selected.
Note that when you want to cancel the scroll area limit, you will have to delete the range address from the scroll area property box.
Ways to Increase Excel Row Limit
Even though there’s no specific formula of increasing the excel row limit, there are some solutions to this problem. One most used solution is the use of the data model. You insert your data into the data model, and then you apply power to view or power pivot options. These options can handle more than 1048576 rows.
You can also insert new multiple sheets if your data is past the 1048576-row limit.
