Monthly Archives: September 2015

Microsoft Excel 2013 maximum number of rows and columns

In Microsoft Excel 2013 the maximum number of rows is 1,048, 576 and the number of columns is 16,384.  These may seem like strange numbers.  Why not 1,000,000 rows? and 10,000 columns? The answer lies in how computers store numbers using binary (or base 2) which only uses the symbols 1 and 0.

The number of 1’s and 0’s (known as bits) that are allocated for storage limit the range of values.  The number of values that can be represented is equal to 2^(number of bits).  In Excel 2013, 20 bits are used for the number of rows, thus there are 2^20 or 1,048, 576 rows.  For the number of columns, 14 bits are used, thus there are 2^14 or 16,384 columns.  Columns are labeled using letters.  This is essentially a base 26 scheme where A = 1 and Z = 26.  The last column is XFD (ie. 16,384).

The last cell in Excel 2013 is XFD1048576.

Excel Limits Showing Max row and column