How to fix Microsoft Excel’s “File not loaded completely” error message [SOLVED]

A client recently reached out to me with the following problem:

When importing a large (72MB) CSV document, Excel reports “file not loaded completely”. 🙁 Sure enough, data is missing. Can you help me?

This issue is caused by Excel only supporting ~1,048,576 rows in a CSV file. In the client’s instance, there were around 1.6 million records. Thankfully, for Excel’s limitation, there is a relatively simple workaround:

  • Open the CSV file in a text editor that supports large file sizes
  • Cut/paste the 2nd half of the CSV file from the original document into a new document (thus you have two documents, each containing ~half the overall data)
  • Re-save the 1st CSV as something like “data-1st-half.csv”
  • Re-save the 2nd CSV as something like “data-2nd-half.csv”
  • Open each CSV in Excel
  • Create a new XLSX file and copy the data from the CSVs into it

After that, you should have all you data in Excel and you can save the resulting file as an XSLX file that supports large row counts. I hope this helps! 🙂

THANK YOU THAT WORKED!

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