Shrink the Size of a Bloated Spreadsheet

Here’s something to try if you have a spreadsheet that seems to occupy far too much disk space given the content it contains.

One sheet at a time, try moving a sheet to a blank workbook and then moving it back to the original workbook until you have done it for all workbooks. I can only guess this copies over only useful information and leaves the invisible cruft behind but have no hard evidence to prove how this process worked for me.

As always, before you muck around with important data make sure you create a backup copy in case something goes wrong but otherwise you can achieve this by doing the following:

1. Right click on the tab for a sheet,
2. Click “Move or Copy”,
3. Select “(new book)” from the drop down list,
4. Click “OK”
5. Right click on the transplanted tab in the new workbook,
6. Click “Move or Copy”,
7. Select the name of the original workbook from the drop down list,
8. Click “OK”
9. Repeat as necessary for all other tabs,
10. Save the original spreadsheet.

I managed to get a spreadsheet that had ballooned out to 27MB down to 700KB and it was as good as new using this method.