No, that’s not the projected population of Guantanamo Bay in 2008. It’s the new maximum capacity of a worksheet in Microsoft Excel 12. The word comes from David Gainer, Group Program Manager for the Excel team at Microsoft, in his new blog:
Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.
I shudder to think what the screen shots will look like when we get to work on Special Edition Using Office 12.
(via Excel Watch)
Ed Bott 
So in Excel 12 I can have column WTF? Very cool. 🙂
Seriously, though, I’ve bumped against the 65K row limitation a few times.
The spreadsheet Active X control only has a quarter million rows, but it has 18,278 rows.
262,144 rows and 18,278 columns
Office 12 is really going to make as much news over the next five years than Vista will. If Microsoft can get the “average user” — that is, the user who never reads any part of the Help file or ever learns anything more than is onscreen and in front of them — to use Word and Excel more effectively, then they will have done the world a great service.
I’m constantly amazed at the vast number of people who refuse to learn to use the tool with which they spend a large part of their day.
Zaine, I deal with those people daily…The folks that would rather use spaces instead of tabs, returns instead of page breaks…And DO NOT get me started on headers and footers!!