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Has Excel had a recent upgrade that means the file size is much smaller?|General Excel Questions & Answers|Excel Forum|My Online Training Hub

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sp_CrumbsHome HomeExcel ForumGeneral Excel Questions & Answe…Has Excel had a recent upgrade that…
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Has Excel had a recent upgrade that means the file size is much smaller?
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Anne Walsh
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February 6, 2019 - 6:35 am
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I've noticed recently - and another user has noticed the same thing - that the file size seems to be much smaller ? Has there been an upgrade that has helped that?

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Mynda Treacy
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February 6, 2019 - 2:05 pm
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Hi Anne,

What version of Excel do you have?

There have been performance improvements to Excel, but I'm not aware of anything that will make the file size smaller.

Mynda

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Velouria
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February 6, 2019 - 4:54 pm
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Switching from the old BIFF8 (.xls/.xlt/.xla) format to any of the newer compressed formats (.xlsx/.xlsm/xlsb/.xlst/.xlam) would reduce the file size, but that change came out a long time ago now, so I'd have expected it to be noticed before now. 😉 You might also notice some further reduction if you switched to .xlsb from another format.

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Anne Walsh
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February 6, 2019 - 6:36 pm
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@Mynda I have Office 365 - version 1808 but another Excel colleague has 1901 and he really noticed the improvements. @Velouria - I thought of that as well but nope, these were .xlsm files. I had noticed it with another file - that had a fair bit of PQ stuff in it and it used to be humongous and then it went down to less than 1 MB. Will check out that link...strange..good though! I thought there might be something I had missed...ah, the mysteries of Excel :-0

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Mynda Treacy
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February 7, 2019 - 11:52 am
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Mmm, I just did a test and the file size reduced by about 16%. I've emailed Microsoft and I'll let you know what they say.

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February 7, 2019 - 5:23 pm
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If they’re files using PQ or data models, perhaps they’ve made improvements to the Vertipaq storage methods. Be interesting to see what Mynda hears from MS, assuming not subject to NDA of course.

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Mynda Treacy
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February 14, 2019 - 9:25 am
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There haven't been any changes in Excel that would result in a file size reduction so it may be a Windows change.

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