Excess formatting
If your Excel workbook is gone slow it might be because of excess formatting. There are many factors involved cause Excel goes slow as listed below.
- Formatting: one of the causes Excel workbooks to become so large that they do not work correctly. Frequently, Excel hangs or crashes because of formatting issues.
- Shapes: there might be many shapes used in workbook cause excel grows large. There are following shapes:
- Charts
- Drawing objects
- Comments
- Clip Art
- SmartArt
- Pictures
- WordArt
- Unused Styles: user might created various styles to decorate the sheet but later point the data is deleted but style remains within Excel
- Conditional Formatting: can cause file grow. This occurs when the conditional formatting in the file is corrupted.
Note: if you can figure out issue by identifying from above list the file will become lighter and faster.
Resolution
Inquire Add-in: It is a COM Add-in which can be enabled in your Excel environment by following below steps. Note this solution is applicable on Excel 2013 or above
- Locate Developer Tab
- Click on COM Add-in button (refer figure 1.0)
- Check the Inquire add-in checkbox from the list as shown (refer figure 1.1)
- Say OK
- The Inquire Add-in will be visible on Ribbon as shown (refer figure 1.2)



Click on Clean Excess Cell Formatting button under Miscellaneous group on Inquire Tab. It will prompt with a dialog asking the cleaning scope as shown below:

Make a choice based on need and say OK. Next it prompts to save changes before performing cleanup as shown below:

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