This stops formulas being recalculated after every edit you make. Want other tips to reduce the file size of your Microsoft Excel workbook? It takes more processing and computational power if there are formulas or other links to other files, because Excel has to jump out of the current file and get information from somewhere else.
Volatile functions in Excel recalculate on every single change, so they can take up a lot of processing power. Consider saving these cells as values if you have a lot of these. For the more advanced Excel users, there might be some array formulas that perform complex calculations.
Excel stores all formatting styles in memory, so you should reduce the amount of formatting you use. Alternatively, have a look at this Clean Excess Cell Formatting add-in from Microsoft that removes formatting from cells beyond the last nonblank cell.
Learn how to format cells in Excel quickly with this Excel Shortcut Roundup. Conditional formatting in Excel is powerful and helpful — but if your slow Excel file has been used for a long time, some rules might not be needed any more.
Too much conditional formatting can cause the file size to increase and slow down the workbook. In Microsoft Excel, shapes can be useful, but only in certain circumstances. If you have imported data or sheets from other files or sources, you have most likely brought in some new formatting styles.
Formatting such as borders, highlighting and unique fonts are good examples to remove. Conditional Formatting is a fantastic way to visually compare any changes in numbers in data ranges, but it can come at a hefty price — a bloated Excel file! One mistake some Excel users make is to apply formatting to an entire sheet, or an entire group of rows or columns.
If the applied range is larger than what you need, then consider limiting it to only the required data range.
Want more formatting shortcuts? Check out this Excel Shortcut Roundup to become lightning-fast at formatting in Excel. But, when you have hundreds of thousands of formulas the time will start to add up, which means you can often be sitting around twiddling your thumbs for minutes at a time. While formula calculation is set to Manual, you can force a recalculation of the entire workbook by pressing the F9 key.
Now, you might notice some strange behaviour when Manual is selected. If you edit a cell containing a formula and press Enter, that formula will calculate as usual.
If you then copy that formula to other cells, the previous result will be displayed temporarily! And if you want a single formula to be updated, you can edit the cell F2 , hit Enter, and that formula will calculate. Do you have issues with slow Excel files? Also in the Formulas menu, you can click on the Watch Window option to open up a small dialog box which appears in front of your Excel workbook.
The Watch Window contains a list of cells that you specifically want to keep an eye on. For example, you might be working on a detailed budget which has workings across multiple sheets. All of those sheets feed values into a high-level budget summary sheet, and you want to know the final profit or loss while working on other sheets. In the Watch Window, click on the Add Watch button and select the cell you want to keep a close eye on.
The value will always be visible, regardless of which sheet is active. Apart from shrinking file size directly, you can use the below tips to optimise your Excel formulas so they run faster. Seven functions in Excel are known as volatile — ie, they calculate every time any cell is updated in the workbook. Microsoft lists them here on their help page. Minimising the use of these functions in your workbook will cut down on unnecessary calculation time.
It may seem slightly counter-intuitive, but using PivotTables instead of a series of formulas is a very effective way to show your results. PivotTables are designed by Microsoft to operate efficiently in Excel, so use them if it makes sense!
Similarly, putting your data in a Table is also very efficient. Any formulas calculated fields within the Table contribute less to file size compared to a series of formulas on a normal data range.
Want to learn more about Excel Tables? So instead of having:. For this tip, you want to reduce the number of cell references that your formulas have. In this case, the total number of cell references is two hundred, despite the number of unique cells only being two.
So if you have a large number of formulas that perform the same calculation, consider breaking them up in your sheet to speed up the calculation. Learn more about Excel formulas here. Apart from updating the file contents directly in Excel, you can try this other method to reduce file size. Because of the way. So there you have it. And even better, your files should spend less time to open, and formulas should take less time to calculate!
Have any of the above tips helped you out, or do you still have issues cutting down on file size? Let us know in the comments! Hi, thanks for your tips above. The method that i found most use useful is to save the Excel Sheet as a Text tab delimited , close it.
As a percentage, approximately how much would the file size shrink after you import the data back into Excel? I tried this Lynn Sandy suggestion and it worked great. Turned a file that was 18, KB into 97 KB. You can edit that when converting if needed.
I had already tried most of the items listed on the article post already to no avail. In one of my Files, the File Size went from Out of curiosity, did your data have a lot of formatting, borders or highlighting? That information may have been contributing to the initial large file size. Just go for PIVOT and take data from there selecting any of the field double click on the numbers you will get a sheet open copy and paste in any other excel sheet it will redue like 9 mb file into some KB.
Another reason for Excel to have an unreasonable file size is due to media, especially Images. Although you may think cropping and Image and resizing reduce its size, in fact Excel still keeps the entire image in memory. Hence the only way to free Image memory is to Compress Pictures. Next select your preffered options. Select Delete cropped Areas of pictures to remove the unseen cropped areas of your images as well as the preffered resolution the lower the more pixelated the image will seem :.
Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Reduce Excel file size… or change the tool Before we start working to reduce the Excel this is a good moment to ask yourself the question… Is Excel the right tool for the job?
Details required :. Cancel Submit. Andreas Killer Volunteer Moderator. I can not reproduce that issue, when I do the same I get file sizes of 14Kb only. Means that issue might be related to an AddIn How satisfied are you with this reply?
Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. In reply to Andreas Killer's post on December 1, Dear Andreas Killer Thanks for your reply. It shall be very helpful. In reply to mahmed's post on December 2, It does not matter now, you said: opened a new workbook, with no data, i ,only hide its rows and save, then unhide the same rows and save again, my file size increased to 2. In reply to Andreas Killer's post on December 2,
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