SOLVED

How to reduce size of an excel file

Copper Contributor
Good day

I have an excel file which is an output of Alteryx and is relatively big (305,521KB). I have done the following:
1. Cleared cache
2. Saved file as binary worksheet ( this helped reduce to 104,041KB)
3. I have deleted all blank spaces
4. Cleared all conditional formatting
5. Formulas calculation options are on manual

Please kindly assist on how to reduce the size as it has become very slow and difficult to work on. I am on excel 2016
5 Replies
The file does not have any formulas

@Amand1040 But what's in the file then? How many rows, columns? Pictures, objects?

There is only text and numbers, no pictures or diagrams. There are 366220 rows and 283 columns
best response confirmed by Amand1040 (Copper Contributor)
Solution

@Amand1040 I'm not at all familiar with how Excel file sizes can be calculated, but when you say 366K rows by 283 column, that means your file has over 100 million cells. If these all would contain 1 byte of data, that would already result in a file size of around 100MB. Then, your 140MB isn't all that strange.

 

Tested this by creation a file with 1 million cells with numbers. Saved it and the file size was 2.9MB. Perhaps my reasoning makes no sense at all, but if performance is an issue, consider connecting to the file with Power Query, rather than opening it in Excel.

 

 

Thanks Riny, i have connected with power query as suggested and the performance is much better.. Thanks
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Amand1040 (Copper Contributor)
Solution

@Amand1040 I'm not at all familiar with how Excel file sizes can be calculated, but when you say 366K rows by 283 column, that means your file has over 100 million cells. If these all would contain 1 byte of data, that would already result in a file size of around 100MB. Then, your 140MB isn't all that strange.

 

Tested this by creation a file with 1 million cells with numbers. Saved it and the file size was 2.9MB. Perhaps my reasoning makes no sense at all, but if performance is an issue, consider connecting to the file with Power Query, rather than opening it in Excel.

 

 

View solution in original post