I have an excel file that started off at about 143K.

It is an employee appraisal form, and it needed a redesign, with the
constraint that it stay in excel (argh).

Anyway, each question was moved to a separate tab, so that I have 8
worksheets in my book.

I locked A1-A4 so that the instructions cannot be changed.

I hid all columns from B to IV.

I enabled protection and allowed users to change row format, add a
row, or delete a row, for each page for rows 5 through whatever they
needed.

The first page is fully protected (more instructions).

The file bloated to 12mB. Is this because of adding the protections?