My users gave me a spreadsheet to research why our program wasn’t able to import.
- I have been slowly dissecting it, and so far have deleted every single column and tab except for one.
- I have selected and deleted all cells and made sure there were none hidden.
- I have also checked that there is no code associated with the tab.
And yet, the file size is still 8 megs! If I create a new tab so I can delete the original, it then shrinks to a few k.
Where else could something be hiding in the tab to keep that size?
UNTESTED!
Extraordinarily large (bytes) workbooks with very little apparent content are all too often created by data dumps into Excel.
One reason can be that the extraction code has been included with the data (check Developer, Visual Basic).
More likely to have a significant size impact is formatting, that can be detected by Editing, Find & Select, Go To Special, Last cell and observing the highlighted cell is a long way from the last ‘occupied’ cell. This can be fixed as below:
Ctrl+Shift+Down.Del.Size may also be increased by embedded objects (check Editing, Find & Select, Selection Pane) and also the content of Comments even where these are not displayed. [The specific answer to this question.]
Pivot tables with broken links may also be a cause.
Other causes can include the likes of the apparently blank ‘last cell’ indeed being occupied (say with a font colour to match the background) or other hidden objects.
Note that in all cases the file size may not reduce in response to ‘deletions’ until it is saved.