A question about a large Excel file that shouldn't be large

[Morama1]

One of my users in our Sales department showed me an Excel file today that when saved is excessively large. All the rows (approx 30) and columns (approx 15) are all using simple formulas (add left to right, top to bottom, summarize at the end kind of stuff). There are 5 tabs in the spreadsheet, all set up very similarly. However, when he saves it, it somehow turns into a 97 meg monstrosity that he can't email due to email attachment size limits.

His figures are automatically pulled from other separate Excel sheets on our shared drives through links that run every time he loads his spreadsheet. I am much more of a hardware technician and certainly no Excel wizard, so I don't really know why something that should be much less than a 1 meg file is ending up so large (this has happened on several of his saved files). All I can figure is that his links are pulling all those other spreadsheets in their entirety, holding them at some sublayer (for lack of a better term), and then extracting what they need to populate his sheet.

Is this roughly correct or is there something else going on that I should be aware of?

 

[Ralston18]

Should not be trying to "pull in" all the other linked spreadsheets.

Any graphics or macro's involved? Does not seem so based on your description but felt it best to ask...

Have him check each spreadsheet and tab to see how big the spreadsheet really is: CRTL + END will place the cursor in the lowest bottom right cell.

Could be that one or more of the tabs believes it is using the entire max spreadsheet size. Especially if the spreadsheets tend to be cloned where such things tend to carry through.