They somehow cooked up a spreadsheet that make them hit the limits much earlier.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988.amp
Excel has grown hugely since then.
You can’t exceed these limits without being heavily alerted/warned by the application too.
Every spreadsheet application and database has these sort of limits anyway, eg:
* Google Sheets limits total cells, although can only handle a tiny fraction of what excel can.
* Postgres limits columns to 1600 (much less than excel)
* Mongo limits document size
They somehow cooked up a spreadsheet that make them hit the limits much earlier.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988.amp