John,

Oops. Never mind. With sheet background images, the file size does seem to
increase with the bitmap (uncompressed) size of the image. I was thinking
about inserted pictures, not sheet backgrounds.

You may be able to get away with a lower-resolution image.
--
Earl Kiosterud
mvpearl omitthisword at verizon period net
-------------------------------------------

"Earl Kiosterud" wrote in message
...
John,

With Excel 2002, I've found that the file size increases directly with the
size of the jpg or gif. I seem to remember in an earlier Excel that it
apparently stored the bitmap, increasing the size substantially. Not
sure -- I might be remembering something that never happened. ):

--
Earl Kiosterud
mvpearl omitthisword at verizon period net
-------------------------------------------

"JDThree [MVP]" wrote in message
...
I've been digging through google as well as MS's support site and the
various
newsgroups, public and private, and haven't found any suggestions for
this.
I've found the question asked, but never answered...

Is there any way when putting a background image in an excel file to keep
it
from shooting the file size up to several meg?

An empty XLS file that starts out as 13.5K turns out to be 3.4 MB with
the
inclusion of a 10k GIF as a background.

Thanks for any suggestions. Just looking into an option for someone who
wanted a background image for a template for some documents they
habitually
do. And since the watermarks are on top of the text, they didn't want a
watermark.

There's not a concern about printing, though we did find a handy macro to
let
it print as well if you want, but these are mostly just computer only,
won't
see paper, so printing wasn't an issue even before we found that
solution.

Thanks for any suggestions.

--
John D [MVP - Tablet PC]