How Big Is A Worksheet?

Category: General Weirdness | [Item URL]

It's interesting to stop and think about the actual size of a worksheet. Do the arithmetic (256 * 65,536), and you'll see that a worksheet has 16,777,216 cells. Remember, this is in just one worksheet. A single workbook can hold more than one worksheet.

If you're using the standard VGA video mode with the default row heights and column widths, you can see nine columns and 18 rows (or 162 cells) at a time. This works out to less than 0.001 percent of the entire worksheet. In other words, nearly 104,000 VGA screens of information reside inside a single worksheet.

If you entered a single digit into each cell at a relatively rapid clip of one cell per second, it would take you about 194 days, nonstop, to fill up a worksheet (longer, if you break for coffee).

To print the results of your efforts would require more than 36,000 sheets of paper - a stack about six feet tall

Oh... and if you're wondering: No, it is not possible to increase the size of a worksheet. The number of rows and columns is fixed. Despite what must amount to thousands of requests to Microsoft, you simply can't coax Excel into displaying more rows or column. No way. It can't be done.

Update: Performing similar calculations for Excel 2007 is left as an exercise for the reader. An Excel 2007 worksheet has 1,048,576 rows and 16.384 columns.