New Workbook Is Huge

[marns007]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

Hello forum people. I will apologize in advance for my unfamiliarity with Excel and total ignorance of the program...please forgive me. If this question is already addressed in the forum and I just missed it---please direct me there.

Here's the deal: I'm in the process of building a database (in Lightspeed2) into which I need to import tab delimited Excel files. Basically, I'm receiving these files from various vendors (as .xls files typically), tweaking them a little bit to suit my needs, re-saving them as tab-delimited, and then importing into Lightspeed once I have properly organized them in Excel. The files may be as short as 10 printed pages---say, 9 columns and 315 rows. But Excel opens a new workbook. It's a HUGE 'workbook' which is 1800 pages. Is this always what happens? I've never really used Excel before, so I'm not sure if this is new to the Excel 2008. Does anyone understand this? Is there any way I can open a simple spreadsheet, or customize a template that's relatively small, or basically not bog down the program with an extraordinarily huge file that is composed almost entirely of empty fields?

I'm completely lost. Any help will be helpful. Thanks in advance.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Excel has a 1 million row size work sheet. When you import your tab
delimited file it will appear on this sheet. However, when you save it as a
tab delimited file it should be only as big as the data? Are you seeing a
lot of blank rows in the output file? If not, and you are only seeing this
after you import the file, this is the correct behavior.

 

[CyberTaz]

Just to ease your mind beyond what Bob G. had to say, what may appear to be
an "excessive" number of cells doesn't have any impact on the actual file
size of your workbook if those cells don't get used. They don't really exist
in the saved file on disk - Excel just "paints them in" when you open the
file to make the available workspace visible. All spreadsheet programs work
the same way - it's just that Excel 2007/2008 have forged new limits with
the seemingly outrageous number of columns & rows available.

Also, the "pages" that have no content do not print. It sounds like you're
using Page Layout View - If so, notice that the pages with no data are shown
a shaded rather than white & bear the "Click to add data" label. Although
you can Hide the unused clumns & rows it doesn't really sound like it would
be worth your time to do so - especially since you say the number of records
varies from one import to another.

 

[marns007]

thanks bob and other responders---you solved my problem. i think i imported/saved the first file somehow with the entire workbook as active data. make sense? it was 29,000+ pages. i have entirely no idea how i did this. i ended up just cutting and pasting my original data into a new workbook, which is now an appropriate and manageable 9 page document. thanks again! you'll be hearing from me soon with other questions i imagine--
best
marns007