Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge? To me it seems like
there's nothing in it...but it weighs in at a couple of megabytes.

http://www.artlum.com/huge.zip

(Zipped down to about 120k...)

I searched this group and tried everything I found. I did the CTRL-End
thing, it puts me at cell A1.

I selected the whole sheet and did "Edit-Delete" - no difference.

I exported it as an older file type, it got smaller.... so... I re-
imported it... and it got big again!

There's no macros, no named ranges, nothing.

So why's it so big and how can I fix it?

I've got a file here with a dozen pages in it and they all have this
same problem, the file is 24 megs and takes a couple of minutes to
load. I tried copying the data into a new file but the problem seems
to come right along with it.

The file above is what I get if I reduce it to a single page and
delete all the data on that page...

On May 12, 10:13 pm, fungus wrote:
Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge?

I guess I should mention that I'm using Excel 2002 SP3 on Windows
XP....

Since ctrl-end took you to A1, it's not the lastcell that needs fixing.

Does the workbook have lots of shapes (pictures, controls)???

Edit goto|special|Objects
hit delete to remove them (all at once).

I didn't open your workbook.

fungus wrote:

Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge? To me it seems like
there's nothing in it...but it weighs in at a couple of megabytes.

http://www.artlum.com/huge.zip

(Zipped down to about 120k...)

I searched this group and tried everything I found. I did the CTRL-End
thing, it puts me at cell A1.

I selected the whole sheet and did "Edit-Delete" - no difference.

I exported it as an older file type, it got smaller.... so... I re-
imported it... and it got big again!

There's no macros, no named ranges, nothing.

So why's it so big and how can I fix it?

I've got a file here with a dozen pages in it and they all have this
same problem, the file is 24 megs and takes a couple of minutes to
load. I tried copying the data into a new file but the problem seems
to come right along with it.

The file above is what I get if I reduce it to a single page and
delete all the data on that page...

--

Dave Peterson

You have several large transparent autoshapes overlayed in A1.

Can find by F5SpecialObjects

Delete these and file drops to 13.5 kb


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP


On 12 May 2007 13:13:11 -0700, fungus wrote:

Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge? To me it seems like
there's nothing in it...but it weighs in at a couple of megabytes.

http://www.artlum.com/huge.zip

(Zipped down to about 120k...)

I searched this group and tried everything I found. I did the CTRL-End
thing, it puts me at cell A1.

I selected the whole sheet and did "Edit-Delete" - no difference.

I exported it as an older file type, it got smaller.... so... I re-
imported it... and it got big again!

There's no macros, no named ranges, nothing.

So why's it so big and how can I fix it?

I've got a file here with a dozen pages in it and they all have this
same problem, the file is 24 megs and takes a couple of minutes to
load. I tried copying the data into a new file but the problem seems
to come right along with it.

The file above is what I get if I reduce it to a single page and
delete all the data on that page...

Dave Peterson wrote:

Does the workbook have lots of shapes (pictures, controls)???

Edit goto|special|Objects
hit delete to remove them (all at once).


........................

Gord Dibben wrote:
You have several large transparent autoshapes overlayed in A1.

Can find by F5SpecialObjects

Delete these and file drops to 13.5 kb



Yep, that was it.

My friend had drawn a border around some text and somehow there were
many thousands of copies of it, all in the same place on top of each
other. When I did "select all-delete" it wasn't deleted, it just
became invisible (which makes no sense to me - is that a bug in
Excel?)

PS: Any ideas how somebody could manage to do that (I mean make
several thousand copies of an object)? Two or three copies I could
understand but not thousands...(!)

It sounds like Gord opened your file and did what he described -- and it worked
ok for him.

Did it work ok for you when you did it a second time? (I'm guessing it did.)

I've seen posts where there are lots of objects added to a worksheet--sometimes
they get copy|pasted from a web page--or duplicated by a misbehaving (poorly
written???) macro.

I don't have a guess how your friend ended up with that many or why it didn't
work for you the first time.

fungus wrote:

Dave Peterson wrote:

Does the workbook have lots of shapes (pictures, controls)???

Edit goto|special|Objects
hit delete to remove them (all at once).


.......................

Gord Dibben wrote:
You have several large transparent autoshapes overlayed in A1.

Can find by F5SpecialObjects

Delete these and file drops to 13.5 kb


Yep, that was it.

My friend had drawn a border around some text and somehow there were
many thousands of copies of it, all in the same place on top of each
other. When I did "select all-delete" it wasn't deleted, it just
became invisible (which makes no sense to me - is that a bug in
Excel?)

PS: Any ideas how somebody could manage to do that (I mean make
several thousand copies of an object)? Two or three copies I could
understand but not thousands...(!)

--

Dave Peterson

On May 13, 2:17 am, Dave Peterson wrote:
It sounds like Gord opened your file and did what he described -- and it worked
ok for him.

Did it work ok for you when you did it a second time? (I'm guessing it did.)


Yep. If I do the "Goto-Special-Objects" thing it highlights
something invisible on the sheet. I can then delete it and the file
goes down from 2Mb to 14Kb.


I don't have a guess how your friend ended up with that many or why it didn't
work for you the first time.


Dunno. I'll ask her on Monday, see what she says.

I don't understand why the object only went invisible when I deleted
them instead of being removed from the file.

I don't have a guess at why that happened to you either.

fungus wrote:

On May 13, 2:17 am, Dave Peterson wrote:
It sounds like Gord opened your file and did what he described -- and it worked
ok for him.

Did it work ok for you when you did it a second time? (I'm guessing it did.)


Yep. If I do the "Goto-Special-Objects" thing it highlights
something invisible on the sheet. I can then delete it and the file
goes down from 2Mb to 14Kb.

I don't have a guess how your friend ended up with that many or why it didn't
work for you the first time.


Dunno. I'll ask her on Monday, see what she says.

I don't understand why the object only went invisible when I deleted
them instead of being removed from the file.

--

Dave Peterson