15,073,280 16,777,216

With clearly too much time on my hands this morning, I found myself wondering how many cells one could have in an Excel spreadsheet. Turns out (unless I'm mistaken, which is totally possible, but I doubt it) the answer is 15,073,280.  I was able to scroll down to row 65,536 and over to column IV (first you have A-Z, then AA, AB, AC, etc. until you get to column IV, then it just stops).  A to IV = 230 x 65,536 = 15,073,280.  Not exactly rocket science nor nearly as exciting as discovering, say, that the earth is round, but it's something.  Maybe it will come up in Trivial Pursuit sometime.  Then again, probably not.

UPDATE: As Mark at AutomaticExcel correctly points out, the correct number is actually 16,777,216.  When calculating A to IV, I forgot about the A to Z before starting at AA (even though I reference it above, I mistakenly didn't use it in the calculation).  So, A to IV is actually 256 columns x 65,536 rows = 16,777,216 cells.  Thanks, Mark!

Comments

[mark]

In case you see it in Trivial Pursuit:

A to IV = 256
Total Cells = 16777216

Cheers!

[Mat Matlock]

The IV/256 goes back as far as Visicalc. I presume, since that is 2^8, that there is a memory allocation that fits here. 1-2-3, v 1A, had 2048 rows, again 2^11 (I think). Later versions of 1-2-3 expanded that number to 8192, then early versions of Excel went to 16384, still 2^??. I believe it was Excel '97 that finally expanded it to 65536. More of that silly 2^??, which probably relates to some amount of memory being allocated to the address.

[David Paull]

Wow! Thanks Mat. I'm just a simple man asking a simple question. You are a wise man giving a wise answer. I bow to you. Thanks for the help.

BTW, for those unaware, I asked Mark if he knew why the max. number of columns is 256 and max. number of rows is 65,536. He wasn't sure and posted the question on his blog where Mat saw it and kindly posted a reply here. Thanks guys!

[riff]

Yeah, it does have to do with powers of 2 for some reason.
Note that number of columns 256 = 2^8
number of rows 65,536 = 2^16
ergo, number of cells = 2^8 * 2^16
=2^(8+16)
=2^24
=16,777,216