Most of us work and collaborate by sending Excel files via email because Excel is not a web-based product. Also, it can be challenging to share a huge 50MB Excel file with your co-workers or clients. The problem is that your spreadsheet will increase in size as you add more data to it. Emailing your Excel file to co-workers or clients can become difficult if it’s too large. Also, Excel may become slow and stop working properly. We have mentioned below the steps to compress the size of spreadsheet files in Microsoft Excel.
Steps to Compress Spreadsheet Files Size in Microsoft Excel
Audit a large Excel file
We’d like to give you some quick advice on how to audit an Excel workbook before demonstrating how to reduce excel file size. Building models with a tone of formulas, tables and spreadsheets is standard practice for financial professionals working in Transactional Services or Investment Banking. However, the Excel file gets heavier as you add additional comments, formulas, conditional formatting, and hidden worksheets. Which sheets in your Excel file are the heaviest can be easily found. Make a copy of your Excel file and perform the following actions to achieve this:
Remove conditional formatting
When you want to highlight specific facts, conditional formatting is useful. However, it can easily add weight to your Excel file. Once you’re done using your spreadsheet, we recommend eliminating conditional formatting. Specifically, you must:
Compress Images in Excel
The cardinal rule is to keep images out of Excel. It’s a good practice to always compress images if you need to use them. And so:
Eliminate hidden data (sheets, rows and columns)
We recommend that you apply this step last as it can break formulas and cannot be reversed! Make a copy first. Let’s start with sheets! Now let’s do the same with columns and rows:
Final Words
So here we end our article on how to compress the size of spreadsheet files in Microsoft Excel. In most corporate situations, the Microsoft Office suite has evolved into a necessary software package for businesses. As part of the Office package, MS Excel, also known as Microsoft Excel, is a tool that allows us to use tables (with rows and columns) to store our data and perform various operations using Excel features. Excel has become a staple software for most companies and people.
