Chubby spreadsheet

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We just added several small GIF images (<10k) to an Excel workbook (Excel 97 SR-2) during the process of getting it ready for intracompany distribution. (There are a number of worksheets and forms in the workbook, and there has been some adding and deleting of temp worksheets as well as copying in worksheets from another workbook.) In the process the workbook has unexpectedly ballooned from 1.4mb to 3.0mb. The changes and additions don't seem to explain the expansion in size. Any thoughts on what happened, and on how to shrink the bloat?

HPMorgan, Schlumberger

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I’m not positive of this, but I would guess that Excel is converting the GIF files into bit maps and that is causing them to baloon to many times their original size.

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Another possibility that has impacted me in the past is that your small GIFs can bloat a bit if you use Excel’s default Paste, which can sometimes mean pasting an embedded OLE object. I’ve had the best luck by choosing Paste Special… and selecting Picture.

A more likely culprit, however, is that worksheets copied from other files are carrying some unwanted baggage. I don’t even know all the nooks and crannies to search here, but look for unnecessary custom formats, defined names, pivot tables carrying data, formatting (such as borders or shading) that carries on to the end of rows or columns… As a test, you could copy and save each sheet as a separate file, and check file sizes to see if any one sheet stands out.

HTH

John

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Yup – I’m betting OLE too! I had one colleague paste a picture in word. The file itself was about 400k. The document ballooned to 4meg and brought is some bad code (Bad code! Bad). Deleting the picture and paste special did the trick.

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First a thanks to those who responded to my request for help. They provided the clue to fix the problem.

An update: Starting with suggestions from this forum, we have shrunk the chubby spreadsheet back to a reasonable size.

To recap, as we manipulated the graphics in a workbook, it went from 1.4 megs to over 3. The cure: Create a new empty workbook, move worksheets there, export objects from the old workbook, and import them into the new one. Net result: The workbook shrank to slightly under 1 meg! That’s smaller than when the problem occurred, suggesting there was already unrecovered waste space in the workbook when we detected a problem. Incidentally the workbook feels snappier.

What I think I learned: During development Excel workbooks cannot be depended on to eliminate internal waste space, so before releasing a workbook to production, a worksheet-by-worksheet, object-by-object transfer to a new workbook should be done.

Does anyone know of a utility available to automate that compacting process?

HPMorgan
Schlumberger

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