Excel – Why is the maximum row height in Excel 546px

microsoft-excel-2003

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?

Best Answer

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.