Size

J

JosephByrns

I have an excel document that has grown to 40MB is size and is likely to
grow a lot more in the next few months (potentially double).

Does anyone have any information on acceptable file sizes for Excel
documents, is there any official information from MS on this?

I have recently learned that there is an increased likelihood of corruption
of the file (especialy so I assume as it contains lots of calculations). Is
there any truth in this?

Thanks.
 
D

Dave Peterson

Actually, Don was suggesting some ways of reducing the size of your workbook.

Debra's site has suggestions on how to reset the last used cell of a
worksheet--if you've ever hit ctrl-end and were taken way past what you thought
should be the bottom left corner of the used range, then these instructions
could help.

Rob's site has a utility that cleans up code -- often times when you make
changes to your code, VBA doesn't clean up after itself. Rob's utility will
make sure that there is none of that invisible junk increasing the size of your
workbook.

=====
My own feelings are that when workbooks reach about 15-20 meg, they become too
slow to work with. But it really depends on what's in your workbook. It may
not be much of a problem with no formulas, but a few thousand =vlookup()'s into
a worksheet with a 10's of thousands of rows could make it very slow.

I don't think you'll find any cause and effect relationship between size and
corruption. But I do believe that there are lots of people who can post
anecdotes about corruption with their giant files. And there will be some who
have never experienced corruption with giant files. (Just a guess, though.)

But I hate files that large just because of the speed/calculation problem (when
they contain lots of formulas).

=====

If you're concerned (I would be!), remember to keep lots and lots of backups.
And maybe consider a different application (Access or some other database????).
 
J

JosephByrns

OK, thanks for that I didn't realise what Don was saying. I ran a cleanup
application on it and it is still large, it is a complicated spreadsheet
with lots of calculations and Macros. I can cope with the slow speed of it,
but was worried about corruption.

Thanks for the reply.
 
Top