If you don’t want to alter the contents of the workbook, try these options first. Remove “blank space” in your sheets. This is definitely the most common source of large Excel file sizes, and fortunately one of the easiest to fix. Excel has a “used range” for every sheet in your workbook.
Another reason for Excel to have an unreasonable file size is due to media, especially Images. Although you may think cropping and Image and resizing reduce its size, in fact. Excel still keeps the entire image in memory. Hence the only way to free Image memory is to Compress Pictures. Crop and Compress Images in Excel.
Another reason for large file size is having many unused or hidden worksheets in your Workbook. Each Excel Worksheet has it’s own share of metadata, more importantly, however, you may be keeping sheets with similar datasets, copies or unnecessary Pivot Tables that also take up a lot of space.
But as you work on a file, it will increase to represent the rightmost column and furthest row that you’ve edited or formatted. Especially in older files, even if cells are blank and have no formatting, Excel may be treating them inside the used range, leading to a larger file size for no reason.
Additionally, if all the users of a shared workbook save and then close the workbook, the workbook may not decrease in file size as it should. Note Excel 2007 files are based on a combination of XML and compression, the file types are usually smaller than legacy XLS file types.
Why does inserting an image to an Excel workbook increase file size?
Inserting an image to an Excel workbook increases the file size by the stored size of the image. This is true, even if you crop and resize the image in Excel. That’s because Excel stores the original image. Test results: The file size of a 9 KB Excel workbook with one empty sheet increased to 170 KB when I Inserted a 159 KB image.
Is bigger always better when it comes to excel?
Bigger is not always better. This is certainly true for Excel files. Large workbooks take more time to open and calculate, occupy more storage space, consume more real-time resources, and are more prone to crashing and corruption.