I have a spreadsheet that takes up about 30 meg (Why? it has only 1500 rows and a dozen columns with much less than 1k of visible characters per row). It takes forever to open (1.5 minutes on this fast laptop despite 50G of available RAM) and simple operations (insert a row, fill down a few cells) take 25 to 30 seconds. I decided to chop it in half and process two separate tables. So I deleted half the rows and saved it as part 1. The resultant table was more or less the same size as the full version! Madness. Why?

Hi
there are lots of answers out there.
One fo them http://www.spreadsheetshoppe.com/how...cel-file-size/

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What's the file size if you copy just your "only 1500 rows and a dozen columns" to a new workbook and save that?

Pecover. Thank you, just saving as xlsx reduced 30 meg to 1.2 meg! Unfortunately it still opens and processes as if it is running on an abacus

Ah, but what's in those 18,000 cells? Array formulae, links to other workbooks, etc. can all have a significant impact on performance.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks guys for helping.

THere is one column that counts up then restarts when a value in the next row changes and another column that decides whether to show blank or a number dependent upon whether or not the next row contains a particular walue. Otherwise it is all passive data. I tried the manual calculation trick, no discernable difference

Nothing onerous

Any conditional formatting, array formulas,macros?

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No none. Formatting is confined to bold or not, red or black and that's about it. No array stuff. Its all easy peasy low level

Tried clearing all cells lower and to the right of the last used cell?

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And also try post #3

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Thank you Peckover! We are done. It is bearable now!