My company (B4 accounting) provides a variety of legacy (typically internally made by employees within each group, not professionally developed) macros and newer (3rd party) toolbars for our workflow. An ongoing and recurring issue is that workbooks tend to get bloated with a bunch of random names (both hidden and visible), causing unnecessarily large file sizes and the continuous need to remove 50k+ names from a file. This is compounded by the fact that teams of people are working across files, where everyone is also using their own personal suite of macros.



My question is how I'd go about pinpointing which macro is dumping all of these names into files? Some are also in Korean or Chinese, and some are referencing other projects. With limited VBA experience, I would guess that some macro has some sort of template file embedded within it, and these names get carried over when certain macros are used. The kicker is that half the macros are password protected, so I'm unable to look into the underlying code.

From your description of the problem ... you will need management from the C-Suites to issue a proclamation how things will change and then for them to enforce those changes. There isn't anything you will be able to do on your own.