Concept: Workday for Google Sheets Performance Best Practices

Refresh, writeback, and expand and collapse complete more quickly and more reliably when reports and workbooks stay within these limits and recommendations.

Report and Workbook Size

Area	Limit
Visible cells on the report	500,000 cells or fewer after blank or zero suppression
Cells requested from Adaptive Planning	1,000,000,000 cells or fewer before suppression
Google spreadsheet workbook	10,000,000 cells or fewer across all sheets. This is a Google Sheets limit.

These limits work independently:

Suppressing blank or zero rows and columns reduces visible cells. It doesn’t reduce how much data Adaptive Planning has to calculate.

If a refresh doesn’t run because the report requests too much data, reduce accounts, levels, time periods, or dimension members. Changing suppression doesn’t help in this case.

Extra empty rows and columns on a sheet still count toward the Google workbook limit. Hiding a sheet doesn’t improve performance and doesn’t remove those cells from the workbook total.

When you build a large report, start with a smaller size and increase it gradually. For large data sets, use several smaller reports instead of 1 very large sheet.

When a report exceeds a limit, Workday for Google Sheets doesn’t refresh the report and leaves the sheet unchanged. Refreshing the same report again doesn’t succeed. Reduce the report, then refresh.

Staying within these limits doesn’t guarantee a fast refresh. Report design, including filters, calculated accounts, rollups, and segments, also affects performance.

Refresh

Refresh runs when you click Refresh
, or when you submit or discard a writeback. Workday for Google Sheets doesn’t refresh automatically when you:

Open a report.

Change the report date.

Import a web report.

Copy a chart to a new sheet.

Start writeback.

Change the report in Report Builder
.

Click Refresh
when you want current data.

While a report is refreshing, a blue progress bar might display in the corner of the screen. Google Sheets is still calculating. Wait for it to finish before you refresh again or use writeback.

Writeback

When writeback is enabled and you enter a value at an editable intersection, the pending-edits status and the Submit
and Discard
options might take a few moments to display. The Workday add-on waits for Google Sheets to send the edit.

If you use conditional formatting to change text color, Google Sheets might reset that formatting when a cell is edited. If formatting looks incorrect after writeback, remove conditional formatting from the affected range.

For writeback reports, in the Workday add-on, from Settings
, select Writeback
to view Enable visible pending edits
:

When you select the check box (the default), cells that you edited but haven’t submitted display in a different text color.

When you clear the check box, editable cells still highlight, but unsubmitted edits no longer change text color. Clearing this check box can refresh large writeback reports faster.

Sign In

When you sign in with a Workday account, you don’t need Google Apps Script enabled in Google Workspace. If your organization restricts Apps Script, you can still connect Workday for Google Sheets.

Report Design

Don’t expand every hierarchy on every axis. Reports that expand time, levels, and accounts to all descendants can generate 1,000 or more columns and fail to refresh. Use Include immediate children
, then expand only what you need. Change 1 expand option at a time, and refresh before you change the next option.

Use suppress blanks and zeros when a report includes Include leaf-level descendants
on more than 1 element in the same segment. Without suppression, Adaptive Planning might not refresh the report because it’s too large. If refresh still fails, expand 1 element at a time.

Filter first, then expand. Start with a narrow slice of version, level, and time. Refresh, then widen from there. Don’t build at maximum size from the start.

Keep 1 Workday report per tab. Stacking multiple reports on 1 sheet, or mixing a large Workday report with many unrelated tabs, often slows refresh.

Workbook Size

Keep the number of tabs low. Workbooks with 20 or more tabs load slowly, including at sign-in. Non-Workday tabs still count.

Stay under the Google Sheets 10,000,000 cell workbook limit. Unused empty rows and columns count toward this limit. A duplicated report can fail with no message on an oversized sheet until you remove those empty cells. Delete unused rows and columns directly in Google Sheets. Don’t download the sheet as Excel and upload it again to trim them.

Don’t download a Workday sheet as Excel and upload it again. That can corrupt the hidden report metadata. The live Google Sheet can still work correctly for its owner, while anyone who opens the Excel copy views Build Report
instead of the existing report. To duplicate a report, copy the sheet inside the same workbook. See Change Existing Reports.

Keep the add-on current. Outdated add-on versions and very old reports can produce duplicate identifier errors on refresh. If a refresh fails with a duplicate identifier error, rebuild the report in the current add-on rather than reusing an older copy.

Refresh and Writeback

Don’t copy a refreshed report from a small workbook into a large existing workbook. Copying a refreshed report into a workbook with 25 or more tabs can fail. Keep Workday reports in a dedicated workbook, or refresh them in place.

Set the spreadsheet locale before you use writeback. From File
, select Settings
. Writeback uses the sheet locale for formula separators, such as a comma or semicolon. EU and other non-US locales need the correct locale, or writeback fails.

If some people experience slow refresh while others on the same report don’t, review Adaptive Planning access rules for that group. Restrictive access on a large report can cause a timeout for 1 group while another loads quickly. Simplify the report or the access rules rather than expanding access.

Sign In and Sharing

Grant every permission on the Google consent screen. If you can’t load the add-on while others can, remove the app’s access in that Google account, sign in again, and grant all requested access, including Sheets and Drive. Selecting only some of the requested access is a common cause of a stuck loading screen.

If sign-in succeeds but the add-on stays on Loading
, uninstall and reinstall the add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace. See Install Workday for Google Sheets.

Share the live Google Sheet, not an Excel download, when you collaborate with others or send a file to support.

When Refresh Doesn't Complete

Situation	Action
The report requests too much data	Reduce accounts, levels, time periods, or dimension members. Suppression doesn’t help.
The report is too large to place on the sheet	Select suppression for blank or zero rows and columns, or reduce the report.
The workbook is over the Google cell limit	Delete unused sheets, or move the report to a new workbook. Empty unused rows and columns still count.
The report takes longer than expected to load	Reduce the report, then refresh again.
Sign-in has expired	Sign in, then refresh.
Google Sheets is unavailable	Wait, then try again. This is often temporary.