Excel Help - badly described problem! Excessive sheet size

Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2013
Posts
4,137
I'll struggle to describe this issue accurately, so bear with me.

Sometimes an Excel Tab will 'maximise' its size. In other words, it will consider all 1,000,000+ potential rows to be actually part of the data, even though they're all empty. I'm not sure what prompts this, I suspect a user of the sheet accidentally doing a full column formatting change or similar.
It has a couple of detrimental effects. It makes the file several MB bigger than it needs to be, it makes that tab run slowly, and it makes the scroll bar useless - as 1 pixel down from the top is off the bottom of the genuine data.

Anyway, sometimes this can be solved by highlighting all full rows below the data, and deleting the lot. But sometimes that doesn't work.
Sometimes I have resorted to starting a new tab and copying the data across, then deleting the original tab.

But the current issue is on a colleagues document, and the tab in question has a load of complicated links to other tabs. The first solution above hasn't worked, and the second would be a massive pain.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows a more official fix for this issue? Aside from not cocking up the spreadsheet in the first place. :D
 

Sui

Sui

Soldato
Joined
24 Sep 2005
Posts
4,355
Location
Brighton
I'll struggle to describe this issue accurately, so bear with me.

Sometimes an Excel Tab will 'maximise' its size. In other words, it will consider all 1,000,000+ potential rows to be actually part of the data, even though they're all empty. I'm not sure what prompts this, I suspect a user of the sheet accidentally doing a full column formatting change or similar.
It has a couple of detrimental effects. It makes the file several MB bigger than it needs to be, it makes that tab run slowly, and it makes the scroll bar useless - as 1 pixel down from the top is off the bottom of the genuine data.

Anyway, sometimes this can be solved by highlighting all full rows below the data, and deleting the lot. But sometimes that doesn't work.
Sometimes I have resorted to starting a new tab and copying the data across, then deleting the original tab.

But the current issue is on a colleagues document, and the tab in question has a load of complicated links to other tabs. The first solution above hasn't worked, and the second would be a massive pain.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows a more official fix for this issue? Aside from not cocking up the spreadsheet in the first place. :D

Try going to file, info, check for issues, inspect document. That can sometimes flag up some oddities.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
2 Nov 2013
Posts
4,137
Yeah, I tried the deleting excess rows (it's hidden amongst the wittering in my original post, but not surprised you missed it!). Didn't work on this occasion unfortunately.

I'll try out that inspect option this afternoon.
 
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