Winzip barely reduces size of some Excel files

[chipjunk]

I create financial models that are often larger than 15MB. Naturally,
I compress them before emailing or saving to a network drive. This has
worked great until recently when files stopped compressing very much.
The one that I'm currently working on is 18MB and only compresses to
17 MB... I am using WinZip 9.0 and Excel 2003.

The size of the model is due to using arrays and an enormous amount of
data. There are no macros and I have tried removing charts and graphs
but it didn't make a difference.

Any ideas will be much appreciated.

 

[Harlan Grove]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...
....

The one that I'm currently working on is 18MB and only compresses to
17 MB... I am using WinZip 9.0 and Excel 2003.

....

Compression works by encoding repeated patterns. If there are few
repeating patterns in the byte image of the file on disk, compression
won't be able to reduce file dramatically. The only alternative would
be to try different compression schemes. If WinZip supports bzip2
compression, try that. If not, try 7-zip or WinRAR. Both generally
provide much better compression (smaller files) than standard zip file
compression.