| title | description | ms.topic | ms.date | ms.localizationpriority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Platform limits and requirements with Office Scripts |
Resource limits and browser support for Office Scripts when used with Excel. |
limits-and-quotas |
02/08/2024 |
medium |
There are some platform limitations of which you should be aware when developing Office Scripts. This article details the browser support and data limits for Office Scripts for Excel.
[!INCLUDE Platform requirements]
Note
If you meet these requirements and are still not seeing the Automate tab, it's possible that your admin has disabled the feature or there's some other problem with your environment. Please follow the steps under Automate tab not appearing or Office Scripts unavailable to start using Office Scripts.
[!INCLUDE Power Automate license support]
There are limits on how much Excel data can be transferred at once and how many individual Power Automate transactions can be conducted.
Excel on the web has the following limitations when making calls to the workbook through a script.
- Requests and responses are limited to 5MB.
- A range is limited to five million cells.
If you're encountering errors when dealing with large datasets, try using multiple smaller ranges instead of larger ranges. For an example, see the Write a large dataset sample. You can also use APIs like Range.getSpecialCells to target specific cells instead of large ranges.
Excel limits that aren't specific to Office Scripts can be found in the article Excel specifications and limits.
The following limitations with the Power Automate platform are the ones you'll most likely encounter.
- Each user is limited to 1,600 calls to the Run script action per day. This limit resets at 12:00 AM UTC.
- There's a 120-second timeout for synchronous Power Automate operations. For long-running scripts, you must either optimize your script or split your Excel automation into multiple script calls.
- The maximum size of parameters passed to the Run script action is 30,000,000 bytes (28.6MB).
Additional Power Automate platform usage limitations can be found in the following articles.
- Limits and configuration in Power Automate
- Known issues and limitations for the Excel Online (Business) connector
There are a few important differences between running a script in the Excel application and running a script as part of a Power Automate flow.
[!INCLUDE External calls in Power Automate]
Some APIs behave differently when run with Power Automate. Others fail due to their reliance on the Excel UI. The full lists are found in Troubleshoot Office Scripts running in Power Automate.
The Excel Business (Online) connector's Run script action doesn't support workbooks with the ISO strict version of the Excel Workbook file format. Flows with this type of workbook return a "BadGateway" error when trying to run a script. This is due to coauthoring restrictions. Please save workbooks as the standard Excel Workbook format for use with Power Automate.
[!INCLUDE Teams support note]
Office Scripts aren't supported on GCC High or above. External calls from scripts may be affected by firewall settings in other government clouds.
Your browser needs third-party cookies enabled to show the Automate tab in Excel on the web. Check your browser settings if the tab isn't being displayed. If you're using a private browser session, you may need to re-enable this setting each time.
Note
Some browsers refer to this setting as "all cookies", instead of "third-party cookies".
Conditional Access policies restrict access to SharePoint and OneDrive for unmanaged devices. If your device isn't managed by the tenant, you may not have access to specific scripts, or may only be able to access them through the browser.
If you script is blocked by Conditional Access policies, you'll receive one of two error messages. These messages also surface in Power Automate if your flow is run from an unmanaged device.
- "Due to organizational policies, you can’t access this resource from this untrusted device."
- "We can't find this script. It may have been deleted by another user." (If your version of Excel is older.)
Important
Administrators should consider blocking all access to Power Automate from unmanaged devices. This process is detailed in the blog post Control Access to Power Apps and Power Automate with Azure AD Conditional Access Policies.
Some Office Scripts APIs may not be supported by Excel for Windows or Excel for Mac, especially older builds. These include newer APIs and APIs for web-only features. If a script contains unsupported APIs, the Code Editor displays a warning. If you try to run such a script, it won't run. Instead, the Script Run Status task pane displays a warning message that says, "This script currently must be run on Excel for the web. Open the workbook in the browser then try again, or contact the script owner for help."
Using an older version of Excel to open workbooks with scripts shared in them has no effect on the script itself.