Excel workbooks growing way too large for no apparent reason...?

[MacBlimp]

Hello,

a colleague of mine is experiencing a weird problem with a number of his workbooks in excel 2007. His workbooks grow a lot when performing seemingly innocent actions. An example from yesterday:

Adding a few hyperlinks to other sheets in the workbook caused the document to grow from 1 072k to an overwhelming 38Mb. No other operations than adding the links were performed between saves.

The document is in excel 97-03 format and he's working in excel 2007.
For some reason, deleting all rows and columns outside the used range of the worksheets (but not neccessarily the worksheet where the canges were made) brings the filesize back to normal for some reason.

If anyone can shed some light at what's happening we'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance

 

[MPW]

Thanks for the post.

You mentioned that you converted a worksheet into the new xlsx format.
That format is used by Office 2007 and 2010. I am using Office 2003. I don't know if there is any issues with the later versions. They might have fixed it by now. I don't think it would work for me in any case since i have quite a bit of vba in the background. I would rather get away from the paste function for this project (if possible).

 

[ChrisA2034]

Hello,

a colleague of mine is experiencing a weird problem with a number of his workbooks in excel 2007. His workbooks grow a lot when performing seemingly innocent actions. An example from yesterday:

Adding a few hyperlinks to other sheets in the workbook caused the document to grow from 1 072k to an overwhelming 38Mb. No other operations than adding the links were performed between saves.

The document is in excel 97-03 format and he's working in excel 2007.
For some reason, deleting all rows and columns outside the used range of the worksheets (but not neccessarily the worksheet where the canges were made) brings the filesize back to normal for some reason.

If anyone can shed some light at what's happening we'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance

I've seen this and here's what I found worked. Use the Excel 2007 Name Manager to delete all names that are no longer used in the worksheet(s). There will be quite a few if there was a pivot table of any reasonable size that you deleted. If they have a #REF in the description you can delete them without checking but if you have set print areas, etc, these will give rise to 'names'. Having done that save the file. My 'best' case was 19M to 202k doing this. Hope this works.

 

[frannyglass]

Could this be the problem?

Excel 2010 Conditional Formatting Nightmare | Contextures Blog