File Size Increase / Can't Break Link

Hi all,

I have a file I use daily. It contains about 20 sheets and is usually around 4MB in size. I have made some additions to the sheet, a large volume of cells with SUMIF and similar formulas to other cells within the file. I would have expected the file size to increase much at all.

A couple of days ago another employee clicked on the "Automatic update of links has been disabled" Security Warning and selected "Enable Content". This was at the end of the day and the screen just froze for a long time. So I locked my computer and left it over night. When I came back in the morning the file was there, still open and I was able to use it. However the file is now about 14.5MB in size.

I have done everything I know of to figure out what the issue is with the size.
- I have deleted columns and rows at the end of the data on each tab to make sure there is no unnecessary data.
- I have saved the file to a web page to see which tabs are the largest but when I go back to Excel I can't find any reason why those tabs are so large
- I have saved a copy of the file, created a new blank tab, deleted all other tabs and saved the file and it only went down from 14.5MB to 11.1MB for a file that contained just one tab with no data on it.
- I have checked Visual Basic to see if any was in there, nothing.
- I have gone to "Edit Links" and found a handful of links on there (this file was created by someone else originally).

I opened up the previous version of the file and noticed that there were about 3-4 new links in the current version that weren't on the previous version. I can remove all of these links except for 1. I have tried removing this link in the file I saved with just the one blank tab but I can't break the link on that file either.

It is the only link that has a source location that doesn't make a lot of sense. It seems to be in the "Users" subfolder on our company network shared drive. It seems like it might be related to another employee who is in the office with me but who has not touched the file, nor has anyone opened the file on his computer. This link has only appeared on this current version of the file - I can't be sure if it was when I had the frozen screen issue or before that.

I don't know if this is the reason for the file size tripling or not but any help to remove this link and reduce the file size would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Thom.

Sounds very weird - have you looked into Name Manager to see if there are any linked names

Also when you're in the VBA editor are there any "very hidden" sheets that show up in the VBA window that you can't see in the Excel window?

I had checked Name Manager. There are hundreds if not thousands of names in there, some that seem to make no sense...but it seems to be the same list as in the previous version of the file which had no issues, so I figured that wasn't a problem. There are too many for me to look at individually but it seems to look the same. Attached is a screenshot of one page of them.

I have unhidden all tabs and I deleted them in the file I mentioned before where I left only 1 blank tab and the file was still 11.1MB.

When I saved the file as a webpage there were 3 huge files created - 1 was for a hidden tab but I couldn't find any reason why that tab was so large.

I'd suggest filtering on that Value column in the name manager and deleting all the REF ones