Google Sheets – Maximum CSV File Import Size

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I'm trying to upload/import a 7 MB .csv file to Google Sheets without much luck.

What's the largest file size that you can import?

Best Answer

Taken from this Help article on Google Docs:

Spreadsheets: 400,000 cells, with a maximum of 256 columns per sheet. Uploaded spreadsheet files that are converted to Google spreadsheets format can’t be larger than 20MB, and need to be under 400,000 cells and 256 columns/sheet.

  • 40,000 of your cells can have formulas.
  • Certain formulas have their own specific limits, too, to make sure that even complex spreadsheets stay fast.
    • Up to 1,000 GoogleFinance formulas
    • Up to 1,000 GoogleLookup formulas
    • Up to 50 Cross-workbook reference formulas and/or Functions for external data.
  • VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP formulas tend to be more complex than other formulas. If your spreadsheet is slowing down or you think you may be approaching limits, you may want to remove some of these formulas.
  • To determine the number of responses that a form can take, you need to take into account the number of questions in your form and the number of other cells of data within your spreadsheet.

Updated - 7th Nov 2017

File sizes

These are the documents, spreadsheets, and presentation sizes you can store in Google Drive.

  • Documents: Up to 1.02 million characters. If you convert a text document to Google Docs format, it can be up to 50 MB.
  • Spreadsheets: Up to 2 million cells for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets.
  • Presentations: Up to 100 MB for presentations converted to Google Slides.
  • All other files: Up to 5 TB.

Supported file types

These are the most common file types you can view in Google Drive:

General files

  • Archive files (.ZIP, .RAR, tar, gzip)
  • Audio formats (MP3, MPEG, WAV, .ogg)
  • Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .BMP)
  • Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
  • Text files (.TXT)
  • Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV, .ogg)

Adobe files

  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
  • Illustrator (.AI)
  • Photoshop (.PSD)
  • Portable Document Format (.PDF)
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
  • Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF) - best with RGB .TIFF images
  • TrueType (.TTF)

Microsoft files

  • Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
  • PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
  • Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

So your file size doesn't seem to be an issue - maybe it is the number of columns and/or cells?

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