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Troubeshooting Sharepoint: Column cannot be added because total size of columns in list exceeds limit..

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Technical Details

Error message

The column cannot be added because the total size of the columns in this list exceeds the limit. Please delete some other columns first.

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: 4cf5829c-c8b1-20d1-a87e-7aea73697765

Date and Time: 4/1/2014 5:58:57 PM

If you are having this error that means you must be trying to make a list whose columns my exceeds the limit.

  

Resolution

How to over come this error?

  • Decrease the Number of columns
    • Delete column or split the list in to two or more lists
  • Decrease the size of the Item.
    • Size can be decreased by changing the site column type
  • Increase List View Lookup Threshold
    • This will remove the error if you are getting the error due to lookup, For lookup Error may be a bit different
  • No other way, Why?
    • (You can not increase "List row size" because it is a Boundary not a Threshold.)

Decrease the Number of columns

The one way is to decrease the number of columns is to delete the unnecessary columns from the content type other is Split the list into two separate list;

Decrease the size of the Item

Decreasing size of item means changing the type of the Site columns to those data type that holds less memory i.e. changing "single line of text" to "number".

 

Increase List View Lookup Threshold

If you are adding more lookups that exceeds the threshold then you need to increase the "List View Lookup Threshold ". How ? Go to central administration under the Application Management find Manage web applications and then find "General settings" and the click on resource throttling.
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Then,
  

No other way, Why?

To understand that you must know that what are boundaries.

Boundaries: Static limits that cannot be exceeded by design

So the boundary is 8,000 bytes per row. 256 bytes are reserved for built-in columns, which leaves 7,744 bytes which means that size of all the site columns must be less than this limit.

  

References

Here is a link to technet.microsoft.com that describes "Software boundaries and limits for SharePoint 2013"