Guide
What to Do When a CSV Is Too Large for Google Sheets
Published
You import a CSV into Google Sheets and it fails, or Google tells you “This file is too large to import directly into Google Sheets”. The file may be nowhere near as big as ones Excel opens, because Sheets does not limit rows or megabytes the way you might expect. It limits cells.
The Limit Is Cells, Across the Whole Spreadsheet
Google’s help centre gives the limit as “up to 10 million cells or 18,278 columns (column ZZZ)” for a spreadsheet, and adds that “the limits are the same for Excel and CSV imports.” Cells means rows multiplied by columns, and the allowance is for the whole spreadsheet, so every tab draws on it.
That limit is doubling. On 10 September 2026, Google announced it had “increased the cell limit in Google Sheets from up to 10 million cells to up to 20 million cells”, and that the new limit “applies to new, existing, and imported files”. It covers Google Workspace business customers, Workspace Individual subscribers and personal Google accounts. The rollout started on 10 September for Rapid Release domains and starts on 28 September for Scheduled Release domains, taking up to 15 days in each case. Google’s main help page still said 10 million when we checked, so until the larger limit has clearly reached your account, work to 10 million.
There is also a limit in bytes that Google does not publish. The same announcement says Google plans to “increase the file byte size limit for imported spreadsheets”, which confirms one exists without saying what it is.
Will Your File Fit?
Multiply the number of rows, including the header, by the number of columns. If the answer is under the limit, the cells fit. Some examples:
| Columns | Most rows at 10 million cells | Most rows at 20 million cells |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 2,000,000 | 4,000,000 |
| 10 | 1,000,000 | 2,000,000 |
| 20 | 500,000 | 1,000,000 |
| 40 | 250,000 | 500,000 |
| 100 | 100,000 | 200,000 |
The column count is the number of names in the header line. For the row count, use a tool that parses the CSV, not a line counter: a value containing a line break spans two lines but is one row. Counting the rows in a CSV shows how, and the tools on this site show the row count of a file as they read it.
Import into a new spreadsheet rather than a new tab of an existing one, so no other tab uses up the allowance. In File › Import, choose Create new spreadsheet as the import location. The same dialog has a Separator character setting — Detect automatically, Tab, Comma or Custom. Google says automatic detection can recognise semicolons, but if the data lands in a single column, import again and choose the separator yourself.
Option 1: Split It into Parts That Fit
The simplest fix is several spreadsheets instead of one. Work out the rows per part from the table above, leave a margin, and split. For a 20-column file under the 10-million-cell limit, 450,000 rows per part is comfortable.
The CSV splitter does this in your browser: choose Rows per file, enter the number, and every part gets the header row. It parses the file properly, so a line break inside a value never cuts a row in two, and the file is not uploaded anywhere. If the file failed because of its size in bytes rather than its cells, use the maximum-size mode instead. Then import each part with Create new spreadsheet.
Option 2: Import Only the Part You Need
Often nobody needs every row and column in Sheets. Three ways to cut the file down before importing:
- One file per team, region or client. The split by column tool writes one file for each value in a column, each far smaller than the whole.
- Fewer columns. Every column you drop multiplies into many fewer cells: removing 10 of 20 columns doubles the rows that fit. Reducing a CSV’s size has tested commands for keeping only the columns you name.
- No repeated rows. Exports that were merged or re-run often contain duplicates; the duplicate remover takes them out.
Option 3: Connected Sheets and BigQuery
Google’s own answer for data beyond the limit is Connected Sheets, which keeps the data in BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse, and lets you work with it from a sheet. Google says you can “access, analyze, visualize, and share billions of rows of data” this way. Since November 2025, opening a large CSV from Drive gives “a new option to import with Connected Sheets when a file is too large for native upload to Sheets”.
It is not the same as having the rows in a sheet. You analyse them through pivot tables, charts and formulas, and Google caps what comes back: “up to 200k rows for pivot tables” and “up to 500k rows or 5m cells for extracts”. The requirements include access to Google Cloud and BigQuery and “a project with billing setup in BigQuery”, and an administrator may need to allow it. It suits a team that already uses BigQuery, and is a lot of setup for one file.
Option 4: Use Something Built for Large Files
If the goal is to look through the data, filter it or total it, a spreadsheet may be the wrong tool at this size. DuckDB answers questions about a multi-gigabyte CSV with one line of SQL, and Excel’s Data Model holds up to 1,999,999,997 rows per table. Opening a CSV that is too large for Excel compares these and other options; most of them apply equally when the spreadsheet you had in mind was Google Sheets.