Columns are Fields in Excel Spreadsheet. Excel Spreadsheet is container in the Workbook, it is in Tabular Format with Rows (Horizontal records) and Columns (Vertical fields). Each Column in a sheet represented with a unique Column Name, starts with Column name A.
Limitations:
Many Excel users raises these common question a about Excel Columns. How many columns in Excel Worksheet? Is there any limitation with Columns in Excel?
There are 16,384 Columns in the latest version of Excel Application (from Office 2007 and higher).
The maximum width of an Excel Column can set to 255 Characters.
| MS Office Version | Row Limitation |
|---|---|
| Excel 2003 | 256 |
| Excel 2007 | 16,384 |
| Excel 2010 | 16,384 |
| Excel 2013 | 16,384 |
| Excel 2016 | 16,384 |
| Excel 2019 | 16,384 |
Usage & Properties
Here are most common uses of Excel Columns in our daily Excel tasks. We can do the following tasks and change the values of below Column properties if required.
| Properties | Usage |
|---|---|
| Width | We can increase and decrease the Column width based on our requirement |
| Fill Color | We can change the Interior Color if the Entire Column |
| Fonts | We can select different font to a Column and format the font size, font name, font color, etc. |
| Hide/Unhide | We can hide or unhide the Columns if required |
| Group | We can Group Specific number of Columns in Excel to Expand and Collapse. |
| Clear | We can Clear Entire Column (range of Columns) at a time |
| Insert | We can Insert columns before or after a specif column |
| Delete | We can delete any specific column if required |
Functions
Excel provided verity of built-in functions to deal with Columns. Here are the most commonly used Column Functions and Formulas.
| Properties | Usage |
|---|---|
| Column(address) | Returns the Column number of the Given Address. Example: Row(D25) returns 4 |
| Column() | Returns the Column number of the Cell. |
| Previous Column | Column()-1, return the previous Column of the Cell where the function is inserted. For example, if you insert this formula at J5, it returns 9. |
| Next Column | Column()+1, return the next Column of the Cell where the function is inserted. For example, if you insert this formula at J5, it returns 11. |
| Columns() | Returns the Column Numbers |
| Column(Range) | Returns the Number of Column in a given Range. For example, =COLUMNS(A1:J2) returns 10. |
| Columns(1:1) | Select the Entire first Column. For example, Sum(Column(5:5)) returns total of Column 5 values. |
| Absolute Reference | We can use $ symbol to make a Column reference absolute. For example $D5 |