What makes excel files large

Why is my Excel spreadsheet so large? Register To Reply. Re: Why is my Excel spreadsheet so large? Always put your code between code tags. These megabyte expansions usually come from formatting and conditional formatting applying themselves far outside of your actual work area. Well, uh I'm trying to do this, and I'm running into the little issue that many of my rows are not un-hiding themselves when I tell them to.

I finally figured out the hidden-cell glitch Anyway, JB was right! I deleted the needless formulae and formatting, and now the file loads in about 10 seconds! What did the file size drop to?

A little over 7MB. VERY helpful - thank you! I got a simple solution. And ctrl end remains inside of cells that have been background filled, not go to the lowest rightmost used cell. Can anyone say what has happened? Try pressing the End button on your keyboard to get out of it. Let me know how you go! Thanks for the info. I used it to clean up a spreadsheet that had multiple sheets and had grown to After cleaning up, it shrunk to 2.

I have not used binary worksheets, but tried that and file reduced to 1. Love finding stuff like this and appreciate you sharing. Hi Chris, Thanks a lot for your great tips. Hi Chris, We often get extremely large Excel files due to the used range. Do you have any advice for this? Hi Donovan, my first suggestion is to try deleting a handful of rows or columns at a time.

Excel might not want to do all of them at once, but breaking it up into 5 or 6 separate delete actions might help! Right-click and select Delete. Any comment to help me to have a workable file afterwrd please?

File size was mb, so i saved it to binary and it is now 31mb, how do i remove all those rows? Try deleting batches of rows, instead of all of them at the same time.

Try selecting 50, or , rows and see if that will work. Then i stumbled across Name Manager and saw all the cell names are still stored and copied over from other workbooks, once deleted, i saved and closed it before reopening the file again.

The first suggestion totally worked. Anyway, thanks! In recent years Excel has added a ton of options, including but not limited to the extended of rows, Adding data to a data model to get special functions in pivot tables. I find using data models is a huge size factor, but it is the only way to get some of the functions. And I now have a MB file that is impossible to share almost everywhere. We still need more answers. I am on Office and ever since I switched to this, I have a spreadsheet that keeps growing in size until it will no longer open.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? This has happened 4 times. My file has 26 tabs is nothing other than downloaded data from Management Report and only one tab has formulas which are nothing more than summary formulas — nothing fancy.

Any ideas anyone? This is a great post, thank you! I had forgotten you can unzip spreadsheets, and the reminder was exactly what I needed to track down a problem. Sheets can be hidden, and they can also be very hidden. The unhide option on the right-click menu will be greyed out, exactly as if there were no hidden sheets.

The Visible property is the last one in the list. The thing that reduced my file to less than 1 mb is when i remove the links in the file. Hi Lin, did you check the file size of data source? As soon as you open the file in Excel, it will be decompressed and your Excel instance will hog the same amount of memory! Thank you very much. I found out that some illiterate person managed to put data into Line 10,,, making the file size 56 Mb. Your tips reduced the file size to 2.

Just by deleting the used range i was able to cut the file size from 68MB to KB. Applying the delete empty rows reduced this to 79kb!!!! Thanks a ton for helping me reduce my macro-enabled worksheet size from a whopping MB to 8.

Tip 1 helped me solve the issue. I wonder whether you have written any VBA for performing the same. The macro in my sheet opens another workbook and copies multiple sheets, performs engineering calculations and presents the results in printable format.

Another tip for those of you who may have embedded images in your spreadsheets e. You can also set your target resolution. I am using MS Office , so it should be the latest one. Interesting thing is that I have added a dummy value in the last cell XFD of my excel sheet. The step was the saver for me as I did everything else. Thanks a lot for publishing it, great work.

Wow, thanks a lot! Oh my goodness — thank you so much!! All that blank space that Excel thought was used. So weird! But took my file size from 21mb to 2mb. Thank you!!! This post definitely helped me out! Almost impossible to transfer to other devices outside of cloud storage. I even deleted worksheets that were over ten years old, and still the file was way too big.

Totally awesome and quick fix. The empty rows tip is amazing. But what I would like to know is why does a sheet suddenly has 1 million rows instead of the real number of rows. What causes that problem? PowerPoint, excel, word. Menard has a YouTube channel with other technology videos covering Excel, Word, Zoom, Teams, Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, and other resources that over 7 million viewers have very appreciated.

Being a member of Microsoft's Creator Teams means many of his videos are available on Microsoft YouTube channel and Microsoft support websites. Excel file size out of control? Share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with people who don't have Microsoft Office Did you know you can share your Office documents with people who do not have a Microsoft Office account?

Securing your Excel and Word files with passwords If you have confidential or sensitive information in your Excel or Word files, you should encrypt your files with a secure password. PowerPoint, excel, word Naming files correctly by Chris Menard. Share this:. This shortcuts takes you to the first cell in your worksheet. Or the top-left cell in case you have some frozen panes at the top, like headers.

This should take you to the bottom of the worksheet.