Massive file size when adding comments with picture

Hi,

I'd be inclined to establish definitively whether the pictures/comments alone are the cause of your problem.

How large are the picture images? By that I mean the physical size showing in the Format Size area of the ribbon when you select an image.

For instance I've just added an picture to a blank sheet and at 18x27 cm the file size is 1725Kb. If I scale the picture down to an icon size 1.6x2.5 the file is just 31Kb so clearly the physical size is going to make a huge difference.

A frequent cause of large file sizes excluding pictures is formulae accidentally being copied to the last row of your sheet. You don;t say in your profile which version of Excel you're using (it would be a good idea to change that) but if you have 2007 or later then potentially you could have formulae all the way down to row 1048576

Hi,

Out of interest how are you getting the images inside a comment? I've never seen anyone do that. Nevertheless what is the physical size of the image. One way or another it will have a significant effect if it's a large image.

What's the size of the file without the comment(s) and just the pictures?

We had a similar problem at work when someone decided to put photos on our shift manning spreadsheet, which ballooned from about 7MB to a LOT larger. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to fix this except to reduce the size of the original photos. It's a pain to do lots of them, but the pain is lessened if you do a batch re-size (using something like the MS Office 'Picture Manager' (Office 2003/2007/2010) or 'Windows Photo Gallery' (2013)*). I often want to send smaller versions of photos by email to family members with very limited internet capability (central Africa), so just copy the photos into another folder (which I unimaginatively name 'smaller' ), then resize them there, so I don't affect the originals. All I can suggest is that you do something similar - sorry!

*I don't have 2013, so can't comment on how good/bad this is - there are various opinions online...

Originally Posted by npbndcis

You can insert an image to a comment in the Format Comment menu under the Colors and Lines tab. You simply click Fill Effects and go the the Picture tab. It's a pretty nifty trick.

The file size of the images vary from 25kb to 2-3mb, and as I mentioned before, after inserting the image to the comment the file size is fixed.

That is indeed interesting. Thanks.

I do sometimes wonder if Excel goes over the top in adding functionality. Fine if it doesn't impinge on the efficient operation of a workbook but not if it does. As Aardigspook says you'd be advised to reduce the size of the originals before using them.

You might also consider a more sophisticated macro driven solution and if you don't need the images to be present all the time only populate the comment with the appropriate image by importing the file at run time and removing it when it's not needed.

I suggest that if you want the pictures to be the same size, create text boxes and insert-link the image to the text box then select both the text box and the image and group.
OR
Insert hyperlinks to the images so that the images are never really part of the Excel file and are only linked to the file.

600 images of 25K each is going to produce a file of over 15MB after the data is added. 600 linked images would greatly reduce the size of the file.

As a test, I inserted links to 100 5MB pictures and the total file size was 24K.