Too Few Rows in New Excel Workbook

In Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, when you create a new workbook, there should be 1,048,576 rows on the worksheet.

Excel2007NewSheet01

Not Enough Rows

However, one of my clients was creating new files in Excel 2007, and the sheets only had 65,536 rows, just as they did in older versions.

Excel2007NewSheet03

Perhaps you don’t need more rows than that, but if you’ve paid for a shiny new version, you’d like access to all of its features!

Solve the Too Few Rows Problem

At first, we thought the problem might be an old Excel 2003 template, that was starting automatically, and being used for the new workbooks.

A search of all the Templates folders didn’t turn up any suspects, so that theory was wrong.

Default Save Format

Finally, we discovered that the default format for saving files was set to Excel 97-2003 Workbook (*.xls).

Excel2007NewSheet02

Change the File Format Setting

To get the full-sized Excel 2007 worksheets, follow the steps below:

  • First, go into the Excel Options.
  • Then, at the left, click on the Save category
  • Next, at the right, in the Save Workbooks section, select one of the newer formats as the default for saving files.
  • Finally, click OK, to close the Options window

Excel2007NewSheet04

All the Rows!

After you change that setting, the problem should disappear.

Now, when you create a new workbook, its sheets will have 1,048,576 rows.
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0 thoughts on “Too Few Rows in New Excel Workbook”

  1. That helps me until I close Excel. Then when I reopen it, it opens in Compatibility Mode and my Save Files in this Format reverts back to .xls. Any thoughts?

  2. I have found with Excel 2010 that if I create a new workbook from teh file menu by going File-New-Create the new workbook opens with the expected 1048576 rows, but if I put the “new” button on the quick start menu, and click it, the new workbook opens with only 65536 rows!
    I checked in File-Options-Save and it is set to save files in *.xlsx format, so that’s not the problem.
    Does anyone know how to fix this problem?

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