Huge Spreadsheet Size (Excel 2000)

[cgschlangen]

Hello - have a questions just out of curiosity
Back in 1999 a person who used to work here created a simple excel document that was in essence a list with items on it - cross checked against a date... It was a daily inventory list that got updated 2 times (perhaps more if items came or went) a month. I recently went to revamp the spreadsheets and noticed that the file size was 7mb. This was for roughly 40 rows and 30 colums of text, shading, and bordering (no formulas.) So I created a new spreadsheet and just copied and pasted the rows/columns I needed and the file size dropped to 26k...
My Question is purely informational - how did the file size grow so large? I deleted everything that wasn't needed as a part of the spreadsheet - but the file size didn't drop at all... any thoughts?
Dan

[HansV]

It is well-known that an Excel spreadsheet collects invisible crud over time, which causes the file size to grow, but your example is extreme. I've seen workbooks shrink by a factor 2 or 3, maybe a bit more, but never by a factor of more than 250. It is hard to imagine what would cause this... Things like unused number formats, empty cells with formatting etc. could account for kilobytes, hardly for megabytes.

[cgschlangen]

That's why I thought I would post it here - I've seen vast accountring spreadsheets that didn't take as much space - and I was very confused at the file size... I just thought I'd see if anyone knew what it may have been... I don't have the old files anymore (though I doubt anyone would want to download it...) perhaps it was just crud - it'd been changed weekly by roughly 10 completely new to excel users - and so many people had screwed around w/ column/row width, cell mergers, borders and shading that I decided to scrap it and start over (and then I noticed the file size!) lol

[LegareColeman]

On the tools menu see if Track Changes is turned on. This can cause a workbook to grow like that.