Explained: File size limit on Google Drive, Docs & Sheets

Google is very generous when it comes to letting you host files files on your free Google Drive account but doesn’t mean that there aren’t limitations. Google has a strict file size limit for Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Sheets that we will explain in this guide.

Until now any files hosted on Google Drive using Google Docs or Google Slides would not have counted against your storage space. However that is about to change on June 1, 2021 and storage won’t be as freely available to everyone so you need to careful about managing your Google storage space.

First we would highly recommend you take a look at the official documentation that shows the limitations of files you can store on Google Drive.

File size limits for Docs, Sheets, Presentations

The following are the maximum file sizes you can store in Google Drive:

Documents and Google Docs

• ​Up to 1.02 million characters (no specification on font size, can be unlimited number of pages).
• If you convert a text document to Google Docs format, it can be up to 50 MB

This means that you can store a document more than 50 MB in size on your Google Drive but if you want to convert it to Google Docs then the file size can’t be bigger than 50 MB.

Spreadsheets and Google Sheets

• ​Up to 5 million cells or 18,278 columns (column ZZZ) for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets.
• Up to 5 million cells or 18,278 columns for spreadsheets imported from Microsoft Excel. The limits are the same for Excel and CSV imports.
  • If any one cell has more than 50,000 characters, that single cell will not be uploaded.

Presentations or Google Slides

• ​Up to 100 MB for presentations converted to Google Slides.

This means that you can store a presentation document more than 100 MB in size on your Google Drive but if you want to convert it to Google Docs then the file size can’t be bigger than 100 MB.

Google Sites (new)

• Up to 200,000 characters per page. 
• Up to 10,000 images per site. 
• Up to 1,000 pages (max 10 million characters).

All other files 

• ​Up to 5 TB.

This means that each individual file that you upload to Google Drive (regardless of any format) can be up to 5 TB each so you can upload as big files such as video, or artwork but remember that they will count against your storage, only your first 15 GB are free.