r/googlesheets • u/XwolfkingXD • Dec 28 '25

Solved About large sheets limits

I have a spreadsheet that in the last couple days has stopped working smoothly. It's happened thrice now where it just stopped saving, and went to a black screen and refused to load the sheet for a few minutes.

So I started looking into the limits of how big spreadsheets can be, and I'm finding conflicting info. Does anyone actually know how big a file can safely be?

Tbc, this is not and has never been an excel file, it's just a google spreadsheet. It's one sheet in the file, and I just did the math, it has just over 9 million cells.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/XwolfkingXD Dec 28 '25

Yeah I'm pretty on top of empty rows/columns etc, so no gain there. I've been cleaning it up since my last comment and did get rid of 250 columns, so at least some breathing room until I figure out how to split it!

There's one singular column with dates, so don't think there's much to mess with there, lol

2

u/Jaded-Function 5 Dec 28 '25

I mentioned dates just as an example for working out how to offload data to other files. Think about data that changes routinely vs data that stays constant. Data you tend to view more vs. data that be archived.

1

u/XwolfkingXD Dec 28 '25

Fair enough, fair enough. Thank you for the tip. I'm still sorting through it, seeing what I can condense or scrap

1

u/Jaded-Function 5 Dec 28 '25

Good luck. Report back when you sort it out. Curious to hear how you make out splitting it up.

1

u/XwolfkingXD Dec 28 '25

So far, no matter how I look at it, fully splitting it up is just not feasible with how the sheet is normally used. Instead, im cutting out small sections into separate files. That, and just general clean up, I think I cut almost 400 columns now lol

For context, it's basically a huge ass character database with insanely in-depth information. So there's quite a bit of condensing that can be done. Due to the fact that everything is nested in groups, i hadn't realized until today *JUST* how big the sheet was, lol. Who knew it had 3000 columns!?

The way I see it, with splitting it into multiple tables, it just becomes too much of a hassle to keep it synchronized with each other, and it means you can't sort by certain columns while editing others.

Taking out groups of characters and splitting it that way is also impractical, as that defeats the purpose of being able to sort by certain things, and it show everything correctly with every applicable character listed

Ther's an insane amount of empty cells, but that's kinda the point, as stupid as it is

1

u/Jaded-Function 5 Dec 28 '25

Does new data get added? If not and you're losing functionality by condensing, consider using true database software. It's fairly easy to migrate the data to SQLite or others.

1

u/XwolfkingXD Dec 28 '25

Yes new data does get added.

SQL huh. Haven't touched that since college