Huge files... why?

[fungus]

Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge? To me it seems like
there's nothing in it...but it weighs in at a couple of megabytes.

http://www.artlum.com/huge.zip

(Zipped down to about 120k...)

I searched this group and tried everything I found. I did the CTRL-End
thing, it puts me at cell A1.

I selected the whole sheet and did "Edit->Delete" - no difference.

I exported it as an older file type, it got smaller.... so... I re-
imported it... and it got big again!

There's no macros, no named ranges, nothing.

So why's it so big and how can I fix it?

I've got a file here with a dozen pages in it and they all have this
same problem, the file is 24 megs and takes a couple of minutes to
load. I tried copying the data into a new file but the problem seems
to come right along with it.

The file above is what I get if I reduce it to a single page and
delete all the data on that page...

 

[fungus]

Can anybody tell me why this excel file is huge?

I guess I should mention that I'm using Excel 2002 SP3 on Windows
XP....

 

[Dave Peterson]

Since ctrl-end took you to A1, it's not the lastcell that needs fixing.

Does the workbook have lots of shapes (pictures, controls)???

Edit goto|special|Objects
hit delete to remove them (all at once).

I didn't open your workbook.

 

[Gord Dibben]

You have several large transparent autoshapes overlayed in A1.

Can find by F5>Special>Objects

Delete these and file drops to 13.5 kb


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

 

[fungus]

Does the workbook have lots of shapes (pictures, controls)???

Edit goto|special|Objects
hit delete to remove them (all at once).

........................

You have several large transparent autoshapes overlayed in A1.

Can find by F5>Special>Objects

Delete these and file drops to 13.5 kb

Yep, that was it.

My friend had drawn a border around some text and somehow there were
many thousands of copies of it, all in the same place on top of each
other. When I did "select all->delete" it wasn't deleted, it just
became invisible (which makes no sense to me - is that a bug in
Excel?)

PS: Any ideas how somebody could manage to do that (I mean make
several thousand copies of an object)? Two or three copies I could
understand but not thousands...(!)

 

[Dave Peterson]

It sounds like Gord opened your file and did what he described -- and it worked
ok for him.

Did it work ok for you when you did it a second time? (I'm guessing it did.)

I've seen posts where there are lots of objects added to a worksheet--sometimes
they get copy|pasted from a web page--or duplicated by a misbehaving (poorly
written???) macro.

I don't have a guess how your friend ended up with that many or why it didn't
work for you the first time.

 

[fungus]

It sounds like Gord opened your file and did what he described -- and it worked
ok for him.

Did it work ok for you when you did it a second time? (I'm guessing it did.)

Yep. If I do the "Goto->Special->Objects" thing it highlights
something invisible on the sheet. I can then delete it and the file
goes down from 2Mb to 14Kb.

I don't have a guess how your friend ended up with that many or why it didn't
work for you the first time.

Dunno. I'll ask her on Monday, see what she says.

I don't understand why the object only went invisible when I deleted
them instead of being removed from the file.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't have a guess at why that happened to you either.