Office Web Apps 2013 - Increase Excel Workbook Size from the 10 MB Limit

 

If you were ever greeted by a message similar to the following:

"Wow, that's a big workbook. Unfortunately, we can't open a workbook larger than 10 MB.

You'll need to open this in Excel."

By default Excel Web App is set to a max size of 10 MB, here are my findings for other Office Web Apps 2013 documents:

  • Word Docs (no preset/published size limits, however, it is limited by file upload size configured on the SharePoint web application for up to 2GB)
  • PowerPoint (no preset/published size limits, however, it is limited by file upload size configured on the SharePoint web application for up to 2GB)
  • Excel Workbooks (Set by default to 10mb size limit, however it can be increased to file upload size configured on the SharePoint web application for up to 2GB)
  • OneNotes (no preset/published size limits, however, it is limited by file upload size configured on the SharePoint web application for up to 2GB)

 

The workbook size is controlled by a property ExcelWorkbookSizeMax, to get the current value of this property

Log onto the Office Web Apps 2013 Server > Open PowerShell and type

Get-OfficeWebAppsFarm

To change this value from 10 MB to lest say 50 MB, just execute the following in PowerShell

Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm -ExcelWorkbookSizeMax 50

And there you have it, happy SharePointing :)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2014
    Hello to all, if you don't have the Office web app server implemented there is another way to do it, this also should be a valid solution for Office 365. "In order to change this value, open SharePoint Central Administration, and go to Application Management > Manage Service Applications > ExcelServiceApp > Trusted File Locations and click on the appropriate Address. Under the Workbook Properties section you will see a Maximum Workbook Size option. Set this value to the required file size in MB, and click OK to save the setting. To avoid the errors above, make sure the value is higher than the largest workbook size in SharePoint.". Link to the original post:http://blogs.technet.com/b/excel_services__powerpivot_for_sharepoint_support_blog/archive/2013/08/13/excel-services-large-workbook-error.aspx
  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2015
    Fabian's comment above is for Excel Services - this article covers Office Web Applications - totally different technologies.
  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2015
    Can we run this command to increase the size of powerpoint files the same way
  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2016
    Thanks :)