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Whenever I try to continue writing the document past ~400 pages, Google Docs disables the typing/input area and cough an error message:

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What is causing the problem?

Is this just me or are documents limited to 400 pages? How can I increase the limits? Do I need to purchase the Google storage options?

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  • 2
    When you say "getting errors" please detail what the errors are, and if possible even a screenshot of it
    – Yisroel Tech
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 12:24
  • @YisroelTech, I've added screenshot.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 13:31
  • @pnuts, The document isn't an upload-convert; it's created from Google Docs. When downloaded, it's a .docx 868,418 bytes and when .docx is opened with mac Pages, it shows 251,487 words, 1,516,781 chars (1,410,523 nonspace chars), 15,539 paragraphs, 398 pages. (It does look like google has a different definition of "characters".)
    – Pacerier
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 13:32
  • Do your document has embedded content like images, charts, drawings, equations,...?
    – Rubén - Volunteer Moderator - ♦
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 13:55
  • @Rubén, text-only.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 11:03

4 Answers 4

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To answer your question: There is no limit, not even '400 pages'. I have now created a Google Doc which is over 1800 pages with text strings (about a million characters.)

There might be another limit though (based on characters or file weight). A valid suggestion is made here that may depend on the size of the file with all of the revisions saved. (That is why they suggest that you should copy it to a new doc which wouldn't have all the revisions.)

Also, you definitely can't add storage to solve the issue since Google Docs files aren't counted towards the general Google Drive storage plan.

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  • I tried copy-paste to a new doc but it's still the same; most likely it's caused by the bulk of the content. I may get to exceed the 1m chars due to a multitude of links which are probably minimized.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 11:10
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There is not a limit of 400 pages in Google docs as I was able to save google doc file with more than 2k pages.

There seems to be character limit though. I was able to save 1,535,692 characters with no spaces in between (as of the 21st of August 2020).

However, I did hit enter after every 50,00 characters (otherwise my doc file would not be able to process the string if there was a long string of more than 100k characters. (I am not sure about the exact number but it is between 100k to 150k). I had around 30 line breaks (not spaces) by the time I typed 1,535,692 characters. Trying to add even one more character would give the same error as the Original Poster is getting.

Hitting enter to create line breaks doesn't count towards the character count. Because, using the word count tool to count the characters after removing some line breaks was not changing the result for character count.

But again, for every line break removed you could actually add one more character.

So, I can say that there is a character limit of approx. 1.53M but the exact number does seem to vary depending on how you have formatted your document.

It's a bit confusing I guess, but Hope this helps!

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On a comment the OP mentions that their document has a "multitude of links".

I didn't test this but I assume that character count features on word processors only count characters that occupy space (a-zA-Z0-9, symbols, tabs, blank spaces, etc.) but not "hidden characters" like the URL of a link that shows an "alias" instead of the URL.

In order to learn if the "multitude of links" is the cause of the problem try

  1. Copy and paste the whole content from Google Documents to a plain text app like Microsoft Notepad, paste the text only version to a new Google Document.
  2. Use a script like the one shared by Mogsdad on their answer to Get All Links in a Document to later count the characters of the URLs.
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Here are all Google Drive limitations https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603

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