How can i use more than 1 million rows in excel?

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How do you get 4 million rows of data into Excel?

So firstly lets face facts.  Not many people need to bring 4 million rows of data into Excel.  Point accepted.

However, some do, and I recently needed to do this.

If you’ve ever checked  (Press End then the down arrow key) Excel has just over 1 million rows, but if you start adding a formula or two to those rows then you will soon have issues.

So how do you do it?

The Answer is PowerPivot!

Here is a screenshot to prove it.  4 million rows of data loaded into my data model from a year’s worth of transactions in a 1.7 GB text file.

How can i use more than 1 million rows in excel?

This data had a column called Period and contained the numbers 1 to 12.   Which isn’t the nicest way to report data, much better to have the month descriptions.  So I then imported a Lookup Table containing the month names and linked these two data sets together (using a simple drag and drop).

How can i use more than 1 million rows in excel?
   
How can i use more than 1 million rows in excel?

That’s the equivalent of 4 million VLOOKUPs calculated instantly.

Finally a quick Pivot Table and done….

How can i use more than 1 million rows in excel?

4 million records isn’t actually that many for PowerPivot (especially not on a 64 bit machine).

The final Excel file compacted down to 90MB due to PowerPivot’s brilliant compression.  And if I’d removed some of the unique fields such as Batch Number then the compression would be significantly better again.

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Even using Excel 64-bit (which is not limited to 2 gb.) on a high-end cpu workstation loaded with RAM you can't do this.

fyi: Excel 64 can address up to 8 terabytes of memory ... that does not mean you can use that much memory !

The limits OriginalGriff mention are for one worksheet: you can, of course, have multiple worksheets per workbook, and multiple workbooks per project.

Quote:

The limit of virtual address space for 32-bit editions of Windows-based applications is 2 gigabytes (GB). For Excel, this space is shared by the Excel application itself together with any add-ins that run in the same process. The size of the worksheet itself also affects the usage of virtual address space. Because Excel loads the worksheet into addressable memory, some worksheets that have a file size of less than 2 GB may still require Excel to use more than 2 GB of addressable memory.

the 64-bit edition of Office does not impose hard limits on file size. Instead, workbook size is limited only by available memory and system resources.

Even if you could ... you'd most likely have a mess that would take forever to recalculate.

Assuming you don't have the funds to buy a supercomputer, you need to use another strategy to create your solution. A strategy that breaks the computational process into steps each of which can work on a subset of the data.

Do investigate Power Pivot, and Power Query, as possible tools that would allow you to use very large data with Excel (I have not used either one): [^],[^].

Read these: [^], [^] for other ideas.

And, as OriginalGriff suggested, consider using a database.

How do I add more than 1 million rows in Excel?

You may generate large csv file yourself manually - save about million of rows from excel as csv, open such csv in Notepad, copy and add or add manually another half millions of rows or so, close the file. Now try to open in Excel - it will show only first million. Try to open in Notepad++ , it will show entire file.

How do I open more than 2 million rows in Excel?

So, how do you open large CSV files in Excel? Essentially, there are two options: Split the CSV file into multiple smaller files that do fit within the 1,048,576 row limit; or, Find an Excel add-in that supports CSV files with a higher number of rows.

How do you exceed 1048576 rows in Excel?

How to Handle More Than 1048576 Rows in Excel.
Step 1: Setting up Source Dataset..
Step 2: Importing Source Dataset..
Step 3: Adding to Data Model..
Step 4: Inserting PivotTable from Data Model..
Step 5: Employing Slicers..
Step 6: Inserting Charts..

Can Excel handle 1 billion rows?

In Excel's case, the limit is 1,048,576 worksheet rows, although you probably wouldn't want to get anywhere near that if you wanted a lag-free experience.