Exceeding Cell Reference of 25M

Julie Fortney

Hello Community friends!

I and a customer of mine have both had complex sheets suddenly start throwing this error message:

Some cross-sheet formulas can't be updated, because this sheet has more cells referenced from other sheets than the maximum allowed (100,000).

I contacted Smartsheet support about my sheet, and they stated that I am actually exceeding the 25M cell reference limit. Now, the difference between last week, when I didn't see this error, and yesterday, when the error popped up, is maybe two additional rows. My sheet contained about 20 columns with index/match formulas, and I realized that I could delete 5 of them that were not necessary. I figured that if I reduced the number of cell references per row by 25% on a sheet with 150 rows, that would easily take us back under the 25M limit.

Unfortunately not - I am still getting the error.

I am in touch with Smartsheet Support about this, but I wanted to reach out to others in the Community to see if you have suddenly started experiencing this in the past two weeks. Our customer is also working with Support, because their sheet is similar to mine - their number of rows stays fairly consistent and the sheet was fine before last week.

Thanks for any insight!

Leibel S

@Julie Fortney

Read through this to get a bit of an understanding about the 25M issue

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/86492/explanation-of-too-many-cells-referenced-error-25m-restriction

If you have a bunch of column formulas referencing entire columns in the sheet, and they are in turn being referenced by other columns, you can run into this issue pretty quickly

Julie Fortney

Hi @Leibel S,

Thanks for the info. I understand the limit; I'm just curious if there is a trend of others experiencing issues with sheets that weren't previously being alerted as exceeding the limit.