A .XLSM file suddenly quadrupled in size

[MichaelDavid]

Greetings! The main workbook for my Excel Macro program is normally about 250
KB in size, and is opened by an Auto_Open macro. It is a macro enabled
workbook containing mostly text strings. But suddenly and without apparent
explanation it increased in size to 700 KB and then a day later to 1295 KB. I
tried to open the 1295 KB file in Excel and after about 20 minutes Excel was
still trying to open the file. So I opened the 700 KB file (took about 6
minutes!) and carefully looked at the data it contained. I did not see any
unexpected or extraneous data. But navigation through the cells was extremely
sluggish. I used an antivirus program and then an anti-spyware program to
scan the 1295 KB file, but neither program found any problems. I should
mention that my computer is running Windows Vista with Service Pack One.
There is 1 GB of RAM and plenty of hard disk space. Excel is the 2007 Home
and Student edition. Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I
can email this 1295 KB file to anyone who is interested in seeing it.
--
May you have a most blessed day!

Sincerely,

Michael Fitzpatrick

 

[Peter T]

Make copies of your respective files (hopefully you've still got the small
original), rename their extensions from .xlam to .zip (ignore warnings).

Open the zip and look for unexpected differences in file sizes. If not too
big try double clicking to open in the default xml editor, eg IE. A typical
reason is formatting in large unused areas of cells, but there are may be
other reasons.

Regards,
Peter T


Open the zips and look for significant yet unaccountable sizes in similarly
named .xml files

 

[MichaelDavid]

Hi Peter:
Your post got me thinking. I could not find anywhere in the code where
formatted cells could be a problem, but I did discover some extraneous data
near the end of the worksheet. By deleting all the rows between there and the
last good data, I reduced the size of a workbook file from 250 KB to 130 KB,
and my macro ran a lot zippier. It being extremely difficult to navigate
through the hugh 1295 KB workbook file, I can only conjecture that things
were so sluggish that the program began writing in the wrong locations near
the end of the worksheet each time it ran thus successively pushing down the
end of the worksheet. Thanks again for the helpful nudge in the right
direction.
--
May you have a most blessed day!

Sincerely,

Michael Fitzpatrick