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Reducing the size of the excel file

Randnumgen

New Member
I have been using an excel file for over 10 years. Overtime I have used the file multiple versions of MS Excel and currently using Office 365.
The file has increased in size over time and it is now more than 3MB. I moved one worksheet from the file to a new workbook and saved the file - the size of the new file was ~1.5MB. And I copied the content of the same sheet and paste (along with formatting) in a new workbook, the size of the new file is only ~45kb. Both the files have .xlsx extensions. Is there are way to reduce the size of the main file?

Suggestions are much appreciated!

PS: I can't copy and paste the contents of old file into a new file as there are multiple sheets and are interlinked (worried some link might go crazy!).
 
3MB is nothing to worry about.

There can be many reasons why a file gets bloated.
One of them is last cell. On each sheet press CTRL + END to find it. If the cell is out of the data range then select all columns from the range end to this column and delete all. Repeat for the rows. Save the file.
Next I would look at the use of formatting.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the response.

I have already tried this option. I deleted the empty rows and columns and also done 'Clear all' in these empty rows and columns. It reduced the file size by only a few kbs.
 
some additional tips can be found here on the forum (older posts, same issue) when you try the search function on the top right of the ribbon.

Hard to tell without seeing the file. Like I've said, 3MB is nothing. The size is often due to XML code that gets generated for used ranges and all kinds of formats. I do not know for sure, but I suspect cell styles and so on, also are stored in parts of the XML as well.

With previous versions there was a way to clean-up the XML (I did it once, following a video on YouTube, without really knowing what I was doing but it worked), yet I believe Microsoft has solved some security issues and now that XML code is encrypted.
 
I understand 3MB is relatively small. But for my purpose, I require the file size to as small as possible.

Will go through the older posts to find more on this topic. Thanks.
 
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