Huge File size (Excel 97)

[Minyi]

In Excel 97 I do a monthly tabulation of facility usage on 3 worksheets, Every month the figures in the tables are replaced with new figures and then save for that month i.e Usage Jan 04, Uage Feb 04 I have noticed that the file size is on the increase every month even though no new cells or formulas are added. The original file size is 200kB but this moth it s about 1.5 MB why is this so.

[pieterse]

No idea <img src=/S/smile.gif border=0 alt=smile width=15 height=15>.

Try these:

- select all sheets and copy them to a new workbook (click the first, shift-click the last, then rightclick and select move or copy)
- press control-end on each sheet and check if the selected cell is not too much outside your used area. If it is, then delete all extraeneous rows and columns and save the workbook.

[Wolf]

Hi,

in addition to what JKP said I could solve a similar problem by copying only the used cells sheet by sheet to a new workbook (not to copy the whole sheet).

This has the disadvantage, that range names (if you have them in the original file) are not transferred.

[Minyi]

Hi

Thanks for the reply but the question that I really want to know is what is the cause for huge file size (the other party just key in figures into the worksheet & did not link the file to other files).

rgds

[unkamunka]

The reason people are making suggestions to set up anoither file is that it sounds like your workbook is slowly becoming corrupted. If that is so, you may start losing your data. Their suggestions may stop that before it becomes a problem. HTH

[pieterse]

One cause can be when a user inadvertantly pushes control-down once too many and ends up on row 65536 and then enters something there. If he/she discovers that and hits delete, it is too late. Excel still thinks that row is in use and your filesize explodes.

File corruption may be another cause.

Yet another thing to try is (version 2000 and up):

Open the file
Save-as filetype Webpage
Close the file
Open the html file
Save-as normal Excel workbook.