Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Excel 2003 file too big?

While providing IT support for a client in Stevenage, I was tasked with troubleshooting an Excel 2003 file which had for some reason grown beyond all reasonable size. It was a relatively simple 8 sheet workbook, with a few hundred lines on each sheet. It gets updated quite regularly and had grown to 18mb in size, taking ages to open.

I followed just about every link I could find on google with suggestions to fix this, including several utilities, to no avail.

Copying & pasting it into a new workbook reduced the size, but messed up the formulas & formatting, which I didn't fancy going through manually to correct.

After a couple of hours of fiddling, the solution I found was to save the file in XML (2003) format, close excel, re-open the xml file, and resave as 2003 format. This shrunk the file down to 334kb. This kept all formatting and formulas.

No idea what Microsoft were saving in there...
Posted by at 14:00

1 comments:

  1. Thank you for this. The same problem has been driving me mad for weeks. I had a workbook much the same size and type as you described, which had become 12mb in size for no apparent reason. (I create a new one every year and all the previous ones were a normal size.) I followed your instructions above and - magic - I now have a file of 305kb. Don't know how or why it works and I don't care - but thank you so much!
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