Has anyone a work around?

Running latest version, 6.4.4.2, LO. Attempting to import Office 2007 worksheet. Lots of discussion on this error message, “The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded.” Haven’t really seen a work around. Anyone care to propose a work around?

I don’t know the exact problem with your particular worksheet is. However, there was a previous question, Maximum number of columns exceeded warning , at the end @persistent linked to a spreadsheet with that problem. Although the answer to that was found to be something to do with formatting extending to column XFD, when I look at that file in Excel I see that Sheet 1 is protected for the whole sheet extending to the border. Excel allows more columns than LO so LO cannot load the sheet because of the protection of cells beyond column AMJ

I suggest you open your file in Excel and remove any large scale protection of cells. Otherwise copy and paste the data range into a new spreadsheet if you can. If you no longer have access to Excel then Google Sheets can handle more columns than Excel at 18,278 so might also open it. Cheers, Al

In all cases where I encountered this message, everything was OK. No data was present in the spreadsheet beyond the 1024 column limit of Calc (Column AMJ), and data “within ragne” was loaded without a problem. As Earnest Al suggests, most likely some formatting/protection has been applied in the column range unsupported by Calc, which has then triggered the warning message.

This is not to say that you can be certain that your data is fine. You need to check your file for actual data beyond column AMJ. @EarnestAl’s Google sheets tip is nice. I didn’t know that. Thanks! Useful when you need to check an Excel file when Excel is not available.