Another reason for large file size is having many unused or hidden worksheets in your Workbook. Each Excel Worksheet has it’s own share of metadata, more importantly, however, you may be keeping sheets with similar datasets, copies or unnecessary Pivot Tables that also take up a lot of space.
You should be asking “Why is my Excel file size so large?”
The Excel is evolved to work with other tools and that kind of file takes a large space. This type of Excel file has extension .xlsx that you are familiar with. But if your Excel file does not need to interact with other tools than save the Excel file as Excel Binary File.
Remove Hidden / Unused Worksheets Another reason for large file size is having many unused or hidden worksheets in your Workbook. Each Excel Worksheet has it’s own share of metadata, more importantly, however, you may be keeping sheets with similar datasets, copies or unnecessary Pivot Tables that also take up a lot of space.
Bigger is not always better. This is certainly true for Excel files. Large workbooks take more time to open and calculate, occupy more storage space, consume more real-time resources, and are more prone to crashing and corruption.
Additionally, if all the users of a shared workbook save and then close the workbook, the workbook may not decrease in file size as it should. Note Excel 2007 files are based on a combination of XML and compression, the file types are usually smaller than legacy XLS file types.
Why does excel take so long to load?
The first reason is loading time. If your excel file is large (2 mb or larger) you will notice longer loading time, reduced performance, unresponsiveness, etc. All this can be avoided if you keep your file size reasonable.
How to reduce the size of an Excel file?
These are the few effective methods to reduce the file size. It happens many times that we import data in excel file for temporary use but forget to remove it. This increases the size of the Excel file. To reduce the size of excel file identify the data that you don’t really need. Delete those ranges and save the file.
Remove “blank space” in your sheets This is definitely the most common source of large Excel file sizes, and fortunately one of the easiest to fix. Excel has a “used range” for every sheet in your workbook. The larger this is, the bigger the file size becomes.
Does excel contain more rows or columns?
Each worksheet can contain 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns of data, and workbooks can contain more than three worksheets if your computer has enough memory to support the additional data. I was shocked to see that MS Excel comes with a limit and can’t contain more than a specified number of rows and columns.
How do columns and rows work in Excel?
How columns and rows work All the columns are lettered and all the rows are numbered. If you were to scroll across the page you reach column Z, then the letters start doubling up with AA, AB and so on.
Yet another question we ran across in our research was “Which has the same number of rows and columns?”.
Select an answer: Excel has the same number of rows and columns. Excel contains more columns. Excel contains more rows. It depends on which contains more data.
Is there a limit to the number of rows in Excel?
I was shocked to see that MS Excel comes with a limit and can’t contain more than a specified number of rows and columns. The error message contained OK button, when I clicked on it, Excel opened the worksheet but only displayed the first 1,048,576 rows.