I had already seen that post and tried it out to no effect. my last attempt was to copy an empty unformatted cell and pasted (format only) to all cells outside the limits of my data. That doubled the file from 5,000Kb to 10,000.Kb.

i have 2 workbooks associated with the project. One is the main book used for data collection and processing. The other i use for code development. The development workbook has retained it's nominal 500Kb size while the main book keeps growing.
I have the date of the onset of this problem (file history) but am unable to pinpoint what caused the change. I know I was working on code to insert new rows to the data around that time. I did ave some exciting momnts but that all occured in the development orkbook.
i have used the ms file repair feature but that does not seem to fix the issue.