Excel sheet takes up a lot of memory

Question

I designed a tool in Excel that contains a sheet that acts as a user input form.

On the sheet is an active-x combo box, eight shapes with assigned macros, and a range formatted with colour and borders to display data.

This sheet takes up around 3Mb of memory. I made a copy and after deleting this sheet the file size drops to around 200Kb and everything is much smoother.

So far I have tried:

• Unhiding all rows/columns and filling all cells in with "No fill"
• Eliminating excessive formatting tool (Inquire tab on the ribbon)
• Deleting all shapes/combo box one by one
• Removing borders and all text
• 'Demerging' all merged cells
• Removing unused styles
• Removing conditional formatting

I was left with a completely blank sheet, and still after deleting the sheet the file size dropped by 3MB.

Why might this be happening?

Answer 1

1. Identify the last filled up row of data and click on any cell in one row below that
2. Select from that row till the end and delete all rows (via right-click menu)
3. Do the same for columns
4. Save and close the file
5. Shut down MS Excel
6. Reopen the file

Let me know if it helps.