Hi all,



I have inherited excel that despite all my attempts, does not seem to give up on its size. I tried deleting names, custom styles, conditional formatting, re-scaling comment boxes - all in vain.

I looked into the zip version of the file and I think there is a problem with something like "customFormat="1" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25" - no idea how to get rid of it.

For the sensitivity purposes, I deleted all the other things from the workboook, so the attached have only one empty sheet, but if anyone could help here - I would be extremely grateful.

Best,
Magda

Attached Files

Excel 1.zip (276.3 KB, 8 views)

I can't guarantee it will work with this specific file, but usually this works:

Open your workbook, and save it with different name (Save As). When you are lucky, the size of renamed workbook will be much less. An optional step will be to repeat the Save As, and overwrite the old workbook.

Why this works? Whenever anything is changed in Excel workbook (edited, added, deleted etc.), Excel keeps the history of those changes. Through the session, this history is used when user is restoring previous entries. After the file is closed, and then later opened again, any history from previous sessions is not accessible anymore, but it still remains there. When user saves the workbook with different name, the history of original workbook is cleared.

Edit. Just read about custom format - missed this at start. You may have entire worksheet formatted with this (Entire worksheet - not a range with data). When this is the case, deleting any number of rows/columns below/right of your datarange doesn't help - new rows/columns Excel adds after deleting are formatted too. To correct this, probably selecting entire worksheet, then removing all formats and saving the workbook, may help. Or you have to create a new sheet and transfer there all data, formulas, formats, etc. from datarange in old sheet (NB! Only from datarange!), and then delete the old one.

Thanks for the thoughts. Indeed, saving it as a new file, the file size reduced, but only by 10%...

The other option of copying the range and pasting it into a new workbook works indeed too, but I was wondering if there is anything that one could do in that particular workbook to fix it... It seems very counter-intuitive that an excel is irrevocably corrupted...

Try selecting all cells, then right-click a row, choose Row Height and change it to 16, then OK. Repeat that but reset to 15. Then save the file.

wow! worked like a charm - thank you!