I am developing a system of 14 linked spreadsheets designed to be used
from a server over a network. Data is entered into 13 of the
spreadsheets over the network. The remaining spreadsheet is _massively_
linked to the other spreadsheets and containing no data itself, does not
need to be updated - but the results and graphs it contains are viewed.
The spreadsheet (~256kB size) is under occasional development and so gets
modified and saved back to the network from time to time. Unfortunately
the file seems to grow by about 256kB every time it is resaved. At one
point it got up to 9MB in size and was taking longer and longer to
download and start.

The spreadsheet file can be slimmed down by 'copy & pasting' whole
worksheets within the workbook and this somehow causes the spreadsheet to
shrink back to its proper size.

Is there any way of avoiding this 'file-inflation' without resorting to
such manual intervention?

The system was originally developed in Win95+Office97-Excel (with a
handful of VBA routines) but has been moved to Server+Win2000-
workstation+Office2000-Excel for operational use.