Optimize filesize in Microsoft Excel — A new feature
Microsoft Excel’s new feature was a lifesaver for me today!
We’ve all struggled with the mystery of why an Excel spreadsheet, with no images or charts and just a few thousand rows of text, ends up being so gigantic in file size. Attempts to “Save As” a new file, delete empty rows, or remove formatting often don’t help. Sometimes, the only solution was to open it in Google Docs or LibreOffice and save it back to Excel format, which could mess up formulas and formatting.
For instance, I’ve used a spreadsheet regularly for the last four years. Two years ago, it inexplicably ballooned to 3 MB and stubbornly stayed that size. To use this file as a template and create a new one, instead of simply copying I had to recreate it from scratch to have a file of the correct size of a few hundred Kilobytes. Today, when I opened the four-year-old file, Excel automatically detected the large file size issue and prompted, “SLOW WORKBOOK? 98% of your workbook has unused formatting and metadata that can be optimized to improve performance.” Clicking “Check Performance” launched a side-panel listing the problems, which were mostly unnecessary formatting in empty cells. Pressing “Optimize all” magically fixed the problem, reducing the file size to just 260 KB.
After experiencing this ‘smart’ feature, I learned it has been available in the web version of Microsoft Excel since September 2023 and in desktop versions since April 2024. To manually invoke the feature, go to the “Review” tab, select “Check Performance,” and work with the options in the “Workbook Performance” side panel. This feature should work on every Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft support advises that the optimization process may cause visible changes to your worksheets, such as resetting the fill colour of empty cells to No Color.
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Originally published at https://venkatarangan.com on October 12, 2024.
