WordPress Posts to Google Sheets and the maximum of 50000 characters in a single cell Saga

Questions
1

I’m using the WordPress node in n8n to retrieve many posts from my website—all of them, actually. That step completes successfully and returns the data. However, when I try to pass that data directly into the next step, which is a Google Sheets node, I get an error and nothing is written to the spreadsheet.

Your input contains more than the maximum 50,000 characters in a single cell.`
This prevents any data from being inserted into the sheet. I assume the issue is due to large post content or a combined array being sent into one cell, but I’m unsure how to structure or limit the data properly for Google Sheets.

  • n8n version: 1.90.2
  • Database (default: SQLite): PostgreSQL
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main): Default (not modified)
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): CapRover (self-hosted on DigitalOcean)
  • Operating system: Linux (DigitalOcean droplet)
2

Well you got a clear reason in the error output.

Google Sheets has a hard limit of no more than 50k characters inserted into a single cell (ie row + column).

There’s no direct way around this except some hacky ideas:

  • use code node to dynamically split the characters in batches of 45k, and have headers like “content”, “content pt2”, “content pt3” etc
  • simply summarize the content before inputting it into sheets
  • just dont use sheets and use something more designed for such large text storage like a database such as Supabase for large storage (or snowflake for fast full text search).