Remove excess formatting in a worksheet to make it light and fast

Remove excess formatting in a worksheet to make it light and fast

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Shapes: there might be many shapes used in workbook cause excel grows large. There are following shapes:
    1. Charts
    2. Drawing objects
    3. Comments
    4. Clip Art
    5. SmartArt
    6. Pictures
    7. WordArt
  3. Unused Styles: user might created various styles to decorate the sheet but later point the data is deleted but style remains within Excel
  4. 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

  1. Locate Developer Tab
  2. Click on COM Add-in button (refer figure 1.0)
  3. Check the Inquire add-in checkbox from the list as shown (refer figure 1.1)
  4. Say OK
  5. The Inquire Add-in will be visible on Ribbon as shown (refer figure 1.2)
figure 1.0
figure 1.1
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:

Next >> Function Wizard Excel Add-in example

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