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How to Reduce the File Size of an Excel Workbook

If you have been using an Excel workbook for a while then you may find that it mysteriously and dramatically increases in size. This is a particular problem with workbooks stored on a shared drive as the Excel file may take a long time to both open and save.

The problem is that Excel can decide that there is more data in a workbook than there actually is, and then stores information about empty cells unnecessarily.

If you have a bloated Excel workbook then follow the steps below to fix the problem.

1. Make a backup copy of the workbook before doing anything else, better safe than sorry.
2. Open the workbook then do steps 3 and 4 for each of the sheets
3. Press Ctrl End to find the cell furthest down the sheet that contains data.
4. If the cell does not contain anything then scroll up to the last row of your data and then delete all of the rows below it. To select the rows, click on the row number of the first blank row then press Ctrl Shift and the Down Arrow. Next press the Delete key.
5. Once you have repeated steps 3 and 4 for all of the sheets, simply save the workbook and the problem should be resolved.

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