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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T18:06:04+00:00

Not sure how a feature that worked fine in previous versions no longer works

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Not sure how a feature that worked fine in previous versions no longer works but I figure there must be a new way to do it that I am unaware of.

I have a simple VLOOKUP.

I have a column (Book#1-ColA) of values (suburbs of Australia)

In an other book (Book#2), I have two columns, (Suburbs (ColA) & Postcodes (ColB))

In Book#1-ColB i place the following:

=VLOOKUP(A1, [Book2.xlsx]Sheet1!$A:$B, 2, FALSE)

But it gives me an error: This file version cannot contain formulas that reference cells beyond a worksheet size of 256 columns or 65536 rows.

I have saved the files as .xlsx and as xls and both file versions fail…

Any ideas on this non-descriptive error?

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NOTE: I changed the reference to [Book2]Sheet1!$A20000:$B2000 and this didn’t work either (assuming that setting the row limit to 20000 was less than 65536!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try [Book2]Sheet1!$A1:$B2000.

    You cannot use column references (e.g. A:B), because the columns are too big, so you need to describe a rectangular range, by specifying two opposite corners.

    A2000:B2000 is a range which is one cell high and two wide. You want to specify the whole rectangle, which I assume starts in the top left corner, so it is A1:B2000 (plus all the accoutrements, such as dollar signs and sheet names)

    If you have a header row, you should use [Book2]Sheet1!$A2:$B2000.

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