Edit

Platform limits and requirements with Office Scripts

  • Article
  • 3 minutes to read

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.

Platform support

To use Office Scripts, you'll need the following.

  1. Excel for Windows (version 2210 or higher), Excel for Mac, or Excel on the web.
    1. The Action Recorder is only available in Excel on the web.
  2. OneDrive for Business.
  3. Any commercial or educational Microsoft 365 license with access to the Microsoft 365 Office desktop apps, such as:
    • Office 365 Business
    • Office 365 Business Premium
    • Office 365 ProPlus
    • Office 365 ProPlus for Devices
    • Office 365 Enterprise E3
    • Office 365 Enterprise E5
    • Office 365 A3
    • Office 365 A5
  4. Internet connectivity with connected experiences enabled.

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.

Data limits

There are limits on how much Excel data can be transferred at once and how many individual Power Automate transactions can be conducted.

Excel

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.

Power Automate

The following limitations with the Power Automate platform are the ones you'll most likely encounter.

Additional Power Automate platform usage limitations can be found in the following articles.

Teams support

Important

When using Excel with Teams, Office Scripts are only supported in Teams on the web (not Teams for Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android).

Third-party cookies for Excel on the web

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".

API support on older Excel versions

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.

See also