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The maximum height of a single row in Excel 2003 is 546 pixels, or 409.5 points:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP005199291.aspx

I'm curious as to why this number was chosen. The other limitations usually give hints into how they have historically been stored in memory. For example, the maximum number of columns and rows are 65536 (2^16) and 256 (2^8), respectively. I'm not aware of any significance of 546px or 409.5pt. Is there anything special about these numbers or is it purely random/cosmetic?

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    I don't think a why on this can be answered. excel specs. You can overcome it by merging two cells. Apr 18, 2016 at 17:17
  • Old question that just got bumped. Atlant Schmidt's answer is good speculation, but nobody here can know "why" unless they were part of the Microsoft design team. So this question isn't really answerable within the site's definition.
    – fixer1234
    Aug 24, 2019 at 21:02

1 Answer 1

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For the same reason as "640KB is more than enough for anyone!"?

I.e., they probably needed a limit for their view renderer and this was chosen arbitrarily but seemed "big enough" at the time.

By the way, 60 * 546 = 32,760 (8 pixels to spare) and 120 * 546 = 65520 (16 pixels to spare) so I suspect that was the arithmetic that drove that early choice.

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  • This seems like pure speculation- can you back it up?
    – bertieb
    Apr 26, 2017 at 14:55
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    Obviously it's just speculation but it's not uncommon for a viewport/pasteboard to have some sort of maximum dimension and a height of 32Ki or 64 Ki rows would be an entirely reasonable maximum. Given that, 546 divides all too conveniently into that value to produce 60 or 120 rows in the viewport. Apr 26, 2017 at 15:01
  • I meant to reply here- now that there's a calculation that gives a reasonable account of (potentially) why, this is a better answer :)
    – bertieb
    Apr 27, 2017 at 12:24

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