Excel file size limit/keeping deleted data?

[stphoton]

One of my salespeople has an Excel file that he's been using for the past 2 years. Each month, rather than start a new file, he's just deleted all the old info, kept the categories and headers, and entered new info. I could see the file size grow from 100k to 780k by looking at the previous months' files in the archive. Yesterday he couldn't open the file (Excel actually locked up). All the previous month's files would open, though. And the file in question could be opened by others with similar configs, including me (he has Excel 2000 on Win98. I have ExcelXP on Win98).

So I saved the file as Exc97, resaved it as Exc2k, and then he could open it. Also, the file size was down to 48k.

My questions are: Is data that is deleted truly deleted, or is it still stored in the file (like in Adobe PageMaker)? Is it possible to purge the file of this old data? And I know there's a record-limit, but is there a file size limit for Excel?

Of course, I'll stop this problem right now by setting up a template, so he can start fresh every month. But it would be helpful for me to have the answers to these questions.

Thanks.

 

[stphoton]

Correction: I'm running ExcelXP (through OfficeXP) and Win2000 professional. And a LOT more memory than him, too.

 

[MattSmithProg]

Excel is not very good at cleaning up after itself. From my experience it can grow from around 100k to nearly 1mb just by deleting some cells etc.

The only thing I can think of do reduce the size of the file is to make sure that empty cells do not have any formatting in them.

I am not aware of any file size restriction that excel places on itself. I think it is only restricting by the amount of memory available to calculate the cells.

Hope this helps

Matt Smith No two nulls are the same