Your CSV is too large for Excel

Excel's hard ceiling is 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns per sheet. It is not a setting and it cannot be raised — the limit is baked into the .xlsx format. Open a CSV with more rows than that and Excel loads the first 1,048,576 and shows a warning that is very easy to click past.

The dangerous part: it fails quietly

The file is not corrupted and nothing looks broken. You get a full-looking spreadsheet with the tail silently missing. If you then save it, the rows beyond the limit are gone for good. This is the single most common way people lose data from a large export, and it produces reports that are merely wrong rather than obviously wrong.

To check whether it happened: scan the file here and compare the row count against what Excel shows at the bottom of the sheet. A mismatch means truncation.

Three ways around it

• Split it. Break the file into parts under the limit and open them separately. Best when you actually need every row.
• Filter first. If you only need one segment — a date range, a country, one status — filter the rows here and export only the matches. Usually the fastest route, because the thing you actually wanted is a fraction of the file.
• Drop columns. Wide exports are often mostly columns you do not need. Keep just the ones you want; it will not help with the row limit but it makes everything downstream faster.

What about Google Sheets?

Sheets caps at 10 million cells, not rows — so the practical row limit depends on your column count. A 20-column file hits the wall at around 500,000 rows, which is worse than Excel. Uploading a confidential export to a cloud spreadsheet also puts it on someone else's server, which is often the actual objection.

Related: How to open a large CSV file · Convert a large CSV to Excel

Common questions

What is the exact Excel row limit? 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per worksheet. It is a limit of the .xlsx file format and cannot be increased.

Does Excel warn me when a file is truncated? It shows a dialog, but it is easy to dismiss without reading, and afterwards the sheet looks complete. Compare the real row count against what Excel reports to be certain.

Will Power Query handle a bigger file? Power Query can process more rows than a sheet can display, but anything you load onto a worksheet is still subject to the 1,048,576 limit.