Why is the maximum row height in Excel 546px?

The maximum height of a single row in Excel 2003 is 546 pixels, or 409.5 points:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP005199291.aspx

I'm curious as to why this number was chosen. The other limitations usually give hints into how they have historically been stored in memory. For example, the maximum number of columns and rows are 65536 (2^16) and 256 (2^8), respectively. I'm not aware of any significance of 546px or 409.5pt. Is there anything special about these numbers or is it purely random/cosmetic?

microsoft-excel-2003

Snorfalorpagus

Posted 2014-07-08T11:08:13.503

Reputation: 193

I don't think a why on this can be answered. excel specs. You can overcome it by merging two cells.

– Raystafarian – 2016-04-18T17:17:18.927

Old question that just got bumped. Atlant Schmidt's answer is good speculation, but nobody here can know "why" unless they were part of the Microsoft design team. So this question isn't really answerable within the site's definition. – fixer1234 – 2019-08-24T21:02:06.443

Answers

For the same reason as "640KB is more than enough for anyone!"?

I.e., they probably needed a limit for their view renderer and this was chosen arbitrarily but seemed "big enough" at the time.

By the way, 60 * 546 = 32,760 (8 pixels to spare) and 120 * 546 = 65520 (16 pixels to spare) so I suspect that was the arithmetic that drove that early choice.

Atlant Schmidt

Posted 2014-07-08T11:08:13.503

Reputation: 26

This seems like pure speculation- can you back it up? – bertieb – 2017-04-26T14:55:23.517

2Obviously it's just speculation but it's not uncommon for a viewport/pasteboard to have some sort of maximum dimension and a height of 32Ki or 64 Ki rows would be an entirely reasonable maximum. Given that, 546 divides all too conveniently into that value to produce 60 or 120 rows in the viewport. – Atlant Schmidt – 2017-04-26T15:01:13.420

I meant to reply here- now that there's a calculation that gives a reasonable account of (potentially) why, this is a better answer :) – bertieb – 2017-04-27T12:24:21.393