Google Sheets cell limit is now 20 million, but a full Excel sheet still may not fit

What is the Google Sheets cell limit now?

The limit is 20 million cells per spreadsheet. Google announced it as generally available in the Workspace Updates post Doubled cell limits in Google Sheets now generally available, and it covers all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers and people with personal Google accounts. Before that it was a beta that a company had to apply for, announced in April 2026.

A cell here means one box in the grid, the meeting point of one row and one column. Google does not give you a separate row limit or a separate tab limit. It gives you one budget of cells for the whole file, and every tab spends from that same budget.

The important detail is that empty cells count as well. A brand new tab in Sheets opens with 1,000 rows and 26 columns, which is 26,000 cells, before you have typed anything. If a sheet has thousands of blank rows at the bottom or blank columns on the right, they are all using up the limit, even though you cannot see anything in them.

Google’s own help page, Files you can store in Google Drive, now reads “Up to 20 million cells or 100MB for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets”. A week ago the same line still said 10 million cells and listed a column limit of 18,278, which is the column ZZZ. The current line does not mention columns at all.

How many rows fit in 20 million cells?

This is the part that decides whether your file will work, and it is simple division. Take 20 million and divide it by the number of columns you actually have. That gives you the most rows you can have in the whole file, if the file has only one tab.

With 10 columns the answer is 2 million rows, but Excel itself stops at 1,048,576 rows on one sheet, so a 10 column Excel sheet always fits by cell count. With 19 columns, a completely full Excel sheet is 19,922,944 cells, and it still fits. With 20 columns, the full sheet is 20,971,520 cells, and it does not. So 19 columns is the widest full-height Excel sheet that fits in the new limit.

Now take a normal export with columns from A to Z, which is 26 columns. The ceiling is 769,230 rows. A wide report with 50 columns stops at 400,000 rows. These are the numbers for one tab. If the file has a second tab with its own data, that tab takes cells from the same 20 million, so the first tab gets fewer rows.

Here is an example. Say you have a sales export of 600,000 rows and 30 columns, which is 18 million cells. That fits on its own. But if the same file also has a lookup tab and a summary tab, and each of them still has the default 1,000 by 26 grid, you have used another 52,000 cells, and any pivot or helper columns you add later come out of what is left. That is why I plan for the whole file and not for the biggest tab.

Why can a big Excel file still fail to import?

Because the file has two limits to stay under, and the cell count is only one of them. The first is the 20 million cells. The second is size in bytes. Google’s help page lists 100MB for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets, and converted is the word that covers an Excel file you open as a Google Sheet.

The two limits bite different kinds of files. A wide file with lots of short numbers usually hits the cell limit first. A file with long text in many cells, like product descriptions, notes or comments, can be heavy in bytes while being small in cells, so it may hit the size limit first. The same announcement says, in Google’s words, that “Coming soon, we also plan to increase the file byte size limit for imported spreadsheets”. So the cell limit has doubled, but the import size limit has not moved yet.

One more rule on the same help page is worth knowing. When you convert an Excel file, any cell with more than 50,000 characters is removed in Sheets. A normal Excel cell can only hold 32,767 characters according to Microsoft’s Excel specifications and limits, so this should not touch a file that Excel itself saved, but it can touch a file made by another program.

The Excel cells number is just 1,048,576 rows multiplied by 16,384 columns. The point of the table is the first row. Excel gives every sheet its own huge grid, while Sheets gives the whole file one budget, and that is the difference people miss when they move a file across.

Why does my Google Sheet still say 10 million cells?

If you use a work or school account, your company decides how fast new features reach you. Google calls this the release track. On Rapid Release you get new features first. On Scheduled Release, as Google’s admin help page Choose when users get new features puts it, users get them at least one week after Rapid Release domains.

For this change, Rapid Release domains started on 10 September 2026 and Scheduled Release domains start today, on 28 September 2026. Google allows up to 15 days for the feature to show up in both cases. So if your company is on Scheduled Release, you may not see 20 million cells until the middle of October, and until then you still get an error if a file goes over 10 million.

This explains a confusing situation. A colleague on a different account opens your big file fine, and you cannot. You are not doing anything wrong, you are simply on a slower track. Only a person with the Domain settings administrator privilege can change the track, so if you need it sooner, it is a question for your IT admin, not a setting you can find yourself. Personal Google accounts are included in the change, but Google does not say which track they follow.

What should you do before you import a large Excel file into Google Sheets?

The goal is to find out before the upload, not after a failed import. This is the order I would work in, and none of it needs anything more than Excel and a calculator.

1. 01
   Count the cells on every tab

   For each sheet, press Ctrl+End to jump to the last used cell, read the row number and the column, and multiply them. Add up all the tabs. Ctrl+End shows the used range, which can be bigger than your real data if old cells were cleared, so this errs on the safe side.
2. 02
   Check the file size

   Look at the size in File Explorer. Anything near 100MB is a risk even if the cell count is fine.
3. 03
   Cut what you do not need

   Delete columns nobody reads, empty rows at the bottom and old tabs. Fewer columns is the biggest win, because every column you remove frees one cell on every row.
4. 04
   Split the file if it is still too big

   Put each year, region or source in its own Google Sheet. Each file gets its own 20 million cells.
5. 05
   Keep room to grow

   A file that fits today at 19 million cells will break next month when new rows arrive. Aim well under the limit, and after importing, delete any empty rows and columns left at the edges of each tab.

Cutting columns is also a cleaning job, and the same habits from cleaning messy Excel data apply here: know which columns are real inputs and which are leftovers from an old report. If the data has to go into Sheets on a schedule, Apps Script inside Google Sheets can append only the new rows each day instead of re-importing the whole file.

And sometimes the honest answer is that Sheets is the wrong home for the data. If you are regularly near the limit, the data wants a database, or it should stay in Excel with Power Query doing the heavy lifting, which I compare in Power Query versus Python for automation. Google Sheets is best as the place where people read and share the result, and the AI functions in my breakdown of the AI layers in Google Sheets work far better on a tidy summary than on a million raw rows.