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Wait, whatttt? Are you kidding me?
That was my exact reaction when I found out that Zoho Sheet’s max row limit is 65,536. Yes, you read it right. Zoho Sheet can’t process more than 65,536 rows.
Don’t get me wrong – I love using Zoho Sheet.
It’s one of the best spreadsheet platforms – packed with a lot of exciting features. Thousands, if not millions, of teams use it for different purposes.
But here’s the kicker, and I hate to break it to you – Zoho Sheet is not meant for big data spreadsheets. On top of this, the 65,536 limit isn’t the only thing you have to worry about.
What if I told you that you can’t import a spreadsheet file > 25MB to the platform? This means, you can’t tap into Zoho Sheet’s powerful features if your spreadsheet file exceeds the platform’s limit.
In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into Zoho Sheet’s limitations.
Let’s talk about Zoho Sheet Limits!
For years, Zoho Sheet has had a set row limit of 65,536. Ten years ago, one of Zoho Sheet’s users asked the Zoho community what the platform’s limitations are, to which someone from Zoho’s CS team wrote to him –
But that was ten years ago, when companies were not generating massive amount of data. Fast forward to today, that’s not the case.
Last week, one of our potential customers mentioned to our CS team that many of their spreadsheet files have more than 100,000 rows. They also mentioned that many of their spreadsheet files exceed Excel’s row limit, i.e., 1,048,576.
In the last ten years, Zoho Sheet’s row limit hasn’t increased. However, they did work on their column limit, taking it from 256 (which was ten years ago) to 1,024 columns (latest data).
That’s good news.
At the same time, you also need to make sure that your spreadsheet file is not exceeding the five million max cell limit. Yes, Zoho Sheet can’t process spreadsheet files with more than five million cells.
Ten years ago, the max cell limit was one million cells per workbook. The Zoho Sheet team did a great job of increasing it to five million. However, this is still less than Google Sheet's 10M cell limit.
The most disappointing part is – you can’t upload spreadsheet files that are more than 25MB in file size to Zoho Sheet. Last week, I uploaded a massive 140+ GB spreadsheet file to Gigasheet (our big data spreadsheet platform). But when I found out that Zoho Sheet’s max file size limit is 25MB, I was just shocked.
There’s no limit to the number of formulas you can apply. However, Zoho Sheet downgraded their max worksheets limit from no limitations to 256 worksheets – not sure why.
By any means, I’m not saying that Zoho Sheet is not a great platform. It’s an incredible spreadsheet platform. However, it has its limitations.
The point is – Zoho Sheet is not meant for big data. So, if your day-to-day responsibilities involve playing around with big data – Zoho Sheet may not be the right platform for you. Apart from the ones mentioned in this post, there are several Zoho Sheet limitations you should know about.
Click here to read them.
Why does Zoho Sheet has these limitations in place?
I couldn’t have answered this question better than Jason Hines, the CEO at Gigasheet.
In response to this question, he stated, “Nearly all web-based spreadsheets have limited capacity because they’re loading all of the data into browser memory. This is likely why Zoho Sheet imposes these cell limitations. Large file sizes can slow the performance, and even crash the application.
Additionally, these larger file sizes require more storage space on the servers that host Zoho Sheet, which could increase the cost of running the service. By imposing a file size limit, Zoho Sheet can optimize performance and manage costs while still providing users with a powerful and user-friendly spreadsheet tool.
This makes sense as Zoho’s primary focus is on general business productivity, and not big data analytics.”
But that’s not the case with Gigasheet. Gigasheet is actually focused on big data.
Meet Gigasheet – your go-to big data spreadsheet platform.
What’s special about Gigasheet is that it’s actually focused on big data, unlike Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Zoho Sheet, or other spreadsheet applications. At Gigasheet, we’ve employed a cloud-based backend architecture that is horizontally scalable, allowing spreadsheets in Gigasheet to scale indefinitely.
In simple words, Gigasheet is a big data cloud spreadsheet platform.
It doesn’t matter if your spreadsheet file size is 100+ or 200+ GB; you can easily upload it to Gigasheet (considering your existing plan allows it) and work your magic on it. As mentioned before, I uploaded a massive 140+ spreadsheet file to Gigasheet last week.
You can further tap into Gigasheet’s wide range of features like data filtering, grouping, enrichment, and more to break down and arrange your data, helping you analyze it and extract some valuable insights.
I’ve written lots of articles around Gigasheet’s features to help you dive deeper into big data analysis. Here are my top picks:
The ease of a spreadsheet with the power of a database, at cloud scale.
