Size increase when saving spreadsheet

[IPF_au]

I am working in a new company and I have noted the excel file sizes are ridiculously big. Just for an example to prove my point, I work with SAS and export data into excel files, a 1M file output from SAS when I just open, save it and close it with excel 2016 64bits, turns into a size of 2.7M. Is there any thing I could do to fix this? ... power pivot and data models is exactly the same with 160k records, 20 Columns are 38M file ... when working in another place with more complex data model over 800k records was only 8M. I would really appreciate any insight you could provide on this regards, thanks in advance, Irene

[#2]

Hi @IPF_au 

The data model size will depend on the uniqueness of data.  The more columns with more unique items will be harder to compress and therefore a 200k row table of unique data would be much bigger in MB than a 1 million row table with less unique data.

In terms of your non data model Excel file growing to 2MB from a 1MB file, I'm not sure.  If it's a single sheet you could try pressing End then Home to check that unused columns/rows aren't being used.  

Might be expected that a 1MB text file becomes a 2MB Excel file.