Formatting issues from 2003-2007

[jdubble07]

Hi,
I currently have a system that generates reports in Excel 2003. I have Excel 2007 on my computer, hence I typically save the reports into 2007 version. After I constantly add data for a few weeks, some sort of error occurs with the file. It magnifies the byte usage of the file. (Ex: a 17 KB magically becomes a 53 MB file, and is too big to email, use,etc. anymore) Also the file loses all of its formatting (dates, colors, etc) but keeps the data. It eventually becomes a corrupted file and is unusable. My question: Is there a setting in 2007 that will help it easily recognize data from an original 2003 file and allow me to manipulate it anyway I want? It seems there is a bug that keeps 2003 data from transitioning to a 2007 spreadsheet. I understand the "certain functionality may change" disclaimer, but it is totally corrupting my data! A lot of work goes into formatting, just to lose it all eventually.

 

[wigi]

About what kind of formatting / functionality of Excel 2007 do you speak?

 

[boblarson]

How are you formatting it the Excel file? Are you formatting only the cells in use or are you formatting entire columns and rows? If you are doing the latter then you need to stop doing that and only format the used cells. Excel stores formatting information and with a million rows and 10,000 columns (or whatever it is now), that is a lot of formatting information to store.

Also, if you modify the information and then issue a save command, that also stores version level information and will continue to build up. So a SAVE AS will clear out that extra saved information as well.

 

[jdubble07]

Typically just issues with dates, colors, font size, etc. I will take a list of reported data from 2003, color it up and bold my headers; save as 2007 file; and once "so much" data is in the spreadsheet after a few weeks of doctoring the original it will give me an error and revert all data back to a 12-font arial for example.

@boblarson - I am usually formatting complete rows/columns. I could try individual cells to see if it happens again.

Just thought maybe this was a common problem. Our company recently switched to 2007, but our system export module is still 2003. We're having ALL KINDS of issues. Thx

 

[Taul]

I have a similar issue at work, we have a mix of 2003 and 2007 users.
Our database will output an Excel file in 2003 format, I open, use and save the file in 2003 format, so as I'm using 2007 I am actually opening the file in "compatability mode" and I save it as 2003 format. I find this works best.

 

[boblarson]

I found out about this formatting stuff and how it holds the information when I had did research about a spreadsheet I was outputting to for a project I was working on. It was coming up as a very large file when it should have been only a few kilobytes large. When I started formatting only the in use cells, instead of entire columns or rows, it dropped down to a few kilobytes. So that was in Excel 2003 but multiply that 65,535 rows by 255 columns and then think about Excel 2007 and above with a 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns and you can see what a difference that could generate (although with the XLSX file format it is a zipped XML format but still it could be a problem).

 

[jdubble07]

Thanks all. I'll try these solutions to see if it fixes the problem