What happens when you approach Maximum Rows in Smartsheet?

I know there are many advantages to having many small sheets in Smartsheet rather than one large sheet. However, in some cases, it seems easier to manage to track many small, similar projects on the same sheet.

Has anyone had experience with sheets that have a number of rows near or over the Smartsheet maximum of 5,000 rows.

Since one large sheet could define pretty much everything we do with Smartsheet (we track manufacturing jobs) I wouldn't care if it took a sheet several minutes to load, if filtering, printing and reporting were reasonbly efficient.

If a large sheet (arounf 5,000 rows) won't load, is unstable or drops updates, that would be unacceptable.

Specifically what functions are impacted, by how much and can anything be done to mitigate problems such as a faster internet connection, diiffert browser, faster PC or more PC memory.

I would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks you very much.

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Comments

J. Craig Williams

Chuck,

I'm having a hard time envisioning how one sheet would be easier for separate things.

The largest sheet I think I worked on was for a WBS on a 2 year multiple site project and that was less than 3000 rows.

You said you are aware of the advantages of smaller sheets so I won't belabor those points.

If Smartsheet's development team is any good (and my experience leads me to believe they are), then they would have stability and reliability as part of their functional specfication. If such were a case, they may have also tested throughput and speed on various size sheets to determine a reasonable upper limit.

Are you experiencing any problems at the moment or only concerned that you will?

Are you expected to reach the upper limit with your current data set? What will you do when you get 10 or 100 new projects? Have you projected how long one sheet with 5000 rows will be sufficient for your needs?

Very curious on your results,

Craig

J. Craig Williams

Also, if you search the Community for "Sheet Size" or filter the discussions by Popularit instead of Recent, you should find a discussion on the issues and concerns.

The thread is worth the read.

Craig

Jeremy Michels

Chuck,

I have maxed out the sheet more time than I can count. You are only counting one varialble in your question. There are several. Rows, Columns, Formulas and Linking. If you are doing all of these or even half of them you will never be able to sustain a sheet at the row level you are talking about.

Since the system is cloud based the best thing you can do to maximize speed is to have a good internet connection and speed.

Travis

Jeremy is correct, there are other factors which affects speed. Rows, columns, formulas, cell linking, conditional formatting, etc all affect speed.

Web browsers also make a huge difference. Chrome constantly runs Smartsheet the fastest. Firefox is the second best option and Internet Explorer is the slowest.

Jeremy Michels

Yes I would recomment Chrome for sure. It is significant in running a better sheet. If you are not running outside apps to complete your processes the sheet will only be limited to the limitations of sheets. The other area that i did not mention is you need to see how many other people are using the sheet at the same time. The risk you run when you have a large sheet and multiple people accessing at the same time, you can get saving overlaps and it can cause the sheet to have issues. It is key in a large sheet for your team to know to refresh as the sheet prompts you to.

Jim Hook

Late last week I started a thread about a similar topic--how saving large Smartsheets can cause formulas to be corrupted. To me, this is a much bigger problem than the time it takes to save or load a sheet since the data can become corrupted and thus meaningless. The main sheet I'm having problems with is less than 1600 rows by 32 columns but it has 20K formulas with varing degree of complexity that are used to track up to 100 projects (their monthly costs) over their active life. I'm the only user that can change the sheet so collaboration should not be a problem. It seems the formula engine can stop part way through updating cell references when a row is moved somewhere in the sheet (especially near the top) and the sheet is then saved. I've split the sheet in two groups of 50 projects and will be testing this week to see if that avoids the problem. I'm using Chrome on a Mac PowerBook Pro.

Jeremy Michels

Jim, see the comments that I posted for you on the sheet size topic. I have some very large sheets and I have a team of 13 people that can work in them succesfully. Also there are limitation to the sheets based on your account. If you are at a Team level the sheets have less power than others.

J. Craig Williams

Jeremy, Travis

re: Also there are limitation to the sheets based on your account. If you are at a Team level the sheets have less power than others

Where can I find more information on this? This is a new one for me.

Craig

Travis

Craig - I think Jermey might be referring to additional features that can be purchased. All sheets have the same 'power' regardless of plan type but some plans include additional features such as Resource Management, Groups, additional security settings, etc.

The pricing page talks about the different plan types and features: https://www.smartsheet.com/pricing-page

J. Craig Williams

Thanks Travis.

I'm very aware of the things I am missing by not being on an Enterprise/Team account at the moment ... but was hoping there wasn't something else.

Craig

bsegovia

I can confirm 5000 rows appears to be the max. We have an app that pushes website lead data via API to several smartsheets. One of them is the "master" sheet that collects everything. It took two years but it filled up and now the API is failing to write new rows.

We'll just clear out the sheet to solve this, but I didnt see a specific "this is the hard number of max rows".

Jim Hook

The 5000 limit on the number of rows may act like the 5000 incoming link limit on a Smartsheet in that once a sheet has the 5000+ incoming links it won't let you add any more. However, if you have 4900 incoming links and try to add 500 more it lets you do it successfully. It seems like the process for adding links, and possibly rows, just checks at the beginning of the action and if there are less than 5000 it goes ahead with it.