Creating a Large Excel File - how large can i go?

I am creating a forecasting model. The excel file getting quite large (6.5MB). Is there a practical excel file size limit i need to be aware of? I don't want to keep adding functionality/features to the model if it will become unstable. I could move some data to a different file but i would prefer to keep the model totally self contained.

It depends a lot on your computer and it's processor, really. The bigger it gets, the more it will slow down.

One thing to be aware of is that, depending on the version of Excel you're using, you may hit a memory limit. (Although I'm not 100% sure on this.) Office 2007 and earlier only came in 32bit versions, and I believe they could only access a maximum of 2GB of RAM. In Excel 2010 there was a 64bit version released, and that accesses much more.

I have models that are almost 20MB and they still work fine, just slow is all.

The only time I've crashed Excel due to memory issues is working with a 32bit version of Excel 2010 when I was running a PowerPivot model. We're talking several hundred thousand rows of data and I accidentally kicked off a circular evaluation. That brought it to it's knees. Ironically, in the 64bit version it is just peachy, as there is enough memory to work through my bad programming.

Hello, I've been working with a 33MB file and shared with another 10 users. The only problem is when you opened it the first time, then you can work without problems.