Managing Larger Data Collections

Many Excel users take advantage of the program's data summary and calculation capabilities to process large data collections. In Excel 2003 and earlier versions, you were limited to 65,536 rows and 256 columns of data in a worksheet. You could always spread larger data collections across multiple worksheets, but it took a lot of effort to make everything work correctly. You don't have that problem in Excel 2007. The Microsoft Excel 2007 product team expanded worksheets to include 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows of data, which should be sufficient for most of the projects you want to do in Excel 2007.

Excel 2007 also comes with more powerful and flexible techniques you can use to process your worksheet data. In Excel 2003, you could assign up to three conditional formats (rules that govern how Excel displays a value) to a cell. In Excel 2007, the only limit on the number of conditional formats you can create is your computer's memory.

The table below summarizes the expanded data storage and other capabilities found in Excel 2007.

Limit	Excel 2003	Excel 2007
Columns in a worksheet	256	16,384
Rows in a worksheet	65,536	1,048,576
Number of different colors allowed in a workbook	56	4.3 billion
Number of conditional format conditions applied to a cell	3	Limited by available memory
Number of sorting levels of a range or table	3	64
Number of items displayed in an AutoFilter list	1,024	32,768
Total number of characters displayed in a cell	1,024	32,768
Total number of characters per cell that Excel can print	1,024	32,768
Total number of unique cell styles in a workbook	4,000	65,536
Maximum length of a formula, in characters	1,024	8,192
Number of nested levels allowed in a formula	7	64
Maximum number of arguments in a formula	30	255
Number of characters that can be stored and displayed in a cell with a text format	255	32,768
Number of columns allowed in a PivotTable	255	16,384
Number of fields displayed in the PivotTable Field List task pane	255	16,384