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#1
Excel files expanding exponentially
Office 365 Excel has obscurely increased file sizes to where they sometimes become unworkable, a problem cited various times on the web. Solutions include deleting/hiding unused ranges of cells, searching for hidden worksheets and hidden formulas, running the Office Repair, even uninstalling and reinstalling Office 365, all to no avail. My simple workpages are only 10 columns wide and not more than 100 lines long. I have been using several formulas for a decade that I constructed (not from 3rd party templates) that keep track of monthly payments on just 13 rental units, maintaining progressive balances. In the earliest files I have, the file size was about 10MB ten years ago and have stayed in that range until last March when it suddenly jumped to 20 MB and now has grown to 25MB with only a few more lines of data entered on each worksheet. The files are saved to OneDrive.
MS support suggested this could happen from improper shutdowns or saving incorrectly, but is the program that fragile that it requires an IT tech to monitor a workbook so simple? The only suggestion that held any credibility was that I may have moved these files through too many revisions of Excel over the years, but that doesn't explain the sudden jump last March.
The workaround solution I used was to manually copy and paste each worksheet into a new workbook by highlighting the original, copying its contents and formulas with the menu command (not Ctrl+C) and doing a special paste into a freshly created workpage. Unused cell ranges were eliminated en masse after all workpages had been moved. [The Copy/Move option on the tab wasn't as clean.] When completed, with everything in the same format and physical layout, the entire workbook is only 118 kb!
How does this occur? Is there no way to look into the belly of these files to see what's going on? There's got to be a reason this happens and a fix for it.