Too many Cell Formats

[Guest]

I work on an extremely complex business model which contains many cell
formats. Although difficult to envisage I have reached the limit of
approximately 4,000 different formatting combinations for a single workbook.
I have read the Microsoft article ID 213904 and understand their solution is
to simplify the formatting. Has anyone found a work around for this as the
formatting is quite critical to the model?

 

[Guest]

One thought - you may have more formats then you're actually using. One
example is if you need to see 10 decimal places in a particular cell. If you
use the button on top of excel to expand the decimal places from, lets say, 4
to 10, the formatting in custom number formats will add a new format for each
step along the way, i.e 0.0000, 0.00000, 0.000000, 0.0000000, etc. So one
check you can do is to go into custom formats and remove those that you dont
actually need. It might be difficult in a large spreadsheet to determine
which formats are not needed.

Also, you might want to consider storing some of your information in another
spreadsheet but linked, then you should be able to eliminate more of them.
hth,
Dave

 

[Guest]

Thanks Dave I was unaware that the cell formatts could tot up so easily. I
will examine this further and attempt to reduce my existing formats. As the
model is so complex the linked workbooks can sometimes create problems. Thank
you for your advice.