How do I make my excel file smaller?

Question

I have an excel file that has a list of data (around 40,000 lines) and some tables running off it.

It gets bigger and bigger (currently 10mb), but if I compress it into a .zip it gets smaller again <2mb.

Why is excel so wasteful, and can I do the same thing in excel?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I saved a 6Mb Excel 2000 spreadsheet as Excel 95 - it reduced to 1.5Mb. I reopened the 95 sheet and saved it as Excel 2000 - it was still 1.5Mb. All I lost was some conditional formatting - the data was absolutely intact.

It's a shame Excel doesn't offer some functionality to remove the "baggage" - it must be change history that it's not clearing.

Try it with your sheet - let us know how it goes...

Answer 2

Is it really necessary to have so much data in the one spreadsheet. Could it not be split into smaller workbooks, rather like tables in Access and linked? That would seem to make more sense. Or, better still, create an Access database and link or import the spreadsheet to it. Excel is a wonderful program but there gets a point where it's best to convert to Access.

Answer 3

You might consider an Access database, which is much more powerful and flexible than a spreadsheet. As it's a relational database you would have to enter each piece of data only once.

Another alternative is to try and split your file into several smaller files which are linked together. You would still have 10 mb but split into smaller sizes.

Answer 4

Here is a good link where you can download winrar for here: http://bit.ly/1BooiXa

You can use winrar to decompress zip files and a bunch of other formats. Other good programs are 7zip and winzip but in my opinion winrar is the best one. Fuctionalities are pretty similar for all programs: basically you can decompress a file simply by right-clicking it and by choosing the destination folder.

Winrar is available for free under a trial licence. The good thing is the trial period never ends so you can use it for free with no limitations.

Winrar opens all formats like .zip, .rar, .7z, .iso, .tar, .jar etc. That's why I recommend it.

Answer 5

There is no way of making the file smaller, however, instead of compresing to a zip file, you can compress to a rar file. To do this, first download from here, http://www.rarlab.com/, the winrar program. Then, right click on the excel document, and compess to rar file. (It has an icon of 3 books next to it.) This is better than a zip file.

Answer 6

If you have that many lines of data, could you use Access instead? If you use pivot tables, Access has cross tabular quieries which do a similar thing to pivot tables.

And, by putting the 40000 lines of data in an Access table, you can then use Excel for data analysis (via the Data menu, and external data quierying) for pivot tables, graphs etc.

Answer 7

So..
I downloaded Winrar for free here http://j.mp/1r2fkwe
I have been using it for years