Condensing Excel file size

[tracy m]

Is there a way to reduce the size of an Excel file? I have a large Excel file that gets e-mailed to others daily. It contains about 3 years of history data for which I have copied-paste special-values to eliminate the formulas. The current couple of months does contain formulas. This file takes extremely long for the recipients to open because of the file size (2675 KB). Any suggestions?

[RET79]

I had a similar problem - I had files with very little in them which were 2M upward in memory and I didn't know why.

So what I did was select all the rows I wasn't using from say row 150 down to 65536 and delete them. Yes, deleting blank rows from beneath your spreadsheet. Sounds weird I know but it did reduce my file space from being 2M+ to being just 200kb.

Give it a try!

RET79

[Tom Schreiner]

I agree with RET79.
It takes file size to retain formatting information.
If each column has it's own format, then make sure you select and format the entire column and not the individual cells. Formatting one column = one set of instructions. Formatting two cells = two sets of instructions even if the formatting is identical.
I'm assuming that you are using a Zip utility as well? If not, use win zip or a similiar zipping utility.
Formatting information is usually shrunken by about 80% or so.
However, if the size of your file is a result of the hard data which it holds, there is not much you can do within Excel it'self. You would need to send your data as a csv or other type file and then update the seperate spreadsheets of other users.
There are other options as well and perhaps more than I realize.
Tom

[tracy m]

Thanks for the responses! I'll see if I can do any of these things to improve the file size.
Thanks,
Tracy

[Jack in the UK]

Hi

Good points ther i recomend as you pates as value its kinda dead, but llok at over formatting, times i see silly formatting or that graphic.. bloat a sheet...

Also any file needs to be Zipped, two reasons, Scripts get crunched my firewalls and also many firewalls can not look inside zip files, silly but true . also some can, need to suss it out.

and the file size of cause, try add password.. this will make firewalls harder to access it all they can do is stop the attachment.

BTW if just a snip of data send it raw in txt on the html RTF side of outlook this will save even more as now sheet attachment, can sent more than one email if needed and copy and paste back into excel, your be surprised it quite easy

just some ideas... take care.