Maximum File Size?

[clove0106]

Hello. I am an avid baseball fan, and I am creating a statistics database for my personal use. I have been developing this for many, many months now, and I have learned a lot about Excel and its capabilities in the process. However, I am becoming concerned because my files occasionally crash Excel, and I am wondering whether this is because my files are getting too large. Typically, the crashes occur when the main file is calculating (but not always). It stops responding, and I have to force the files closed through Windows Task Manager.

Without getting into the specifics of how the files work (although we can do that if it is necessary), here are the names of the files and their current sizes:

Baseball Database.xlsx -- ~28 MB
Baseball Reports.xlsx -- ~5 MB
Statistics.xlsx -- ~4 MB

I will have all three of these files open simultaneously when I am working on them, and my laptop has 4G of RAM. I do not have much (if any) extraneous formatting in the files -- I know how to remove that -- but there is quite a bit of conditional formatting in the files that I want to maintain.

I am wondering how to solve my crashes, and I am considering partitioning (separating) the tabs in the Database file into separate files. This would be a lot of work, so I am looking for advice on how to best accomplish my goal.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. If you need more information, please feel free to ask. Thank you!

[FDibbins]

Hi and welcome to the forum

Your file size should not be a problem, I have worked with files in excess of 300 meg with no problem at all (slows machine down, but no crashes)

What sort of calcs do you have in them?
how much is "quite a bit" of CF?

[popipipo]

Conditional format could be the problem
Delete all cf on a copyfile to test it
Don't use in formulas complete rows/column ranges
Instead of A:A use A1:A1000

[clove0106]

Hello, and thank you for the quick response.

The file is set for Automatic calculation. Is that what you mean?

There are several instances of CF, including:
1.) A player's name will change color to green if he is Active (currently playing), or to blue if he is flagged as a Hall-of-Famer;
2.) A player's individual statistics in a given year will changed color to light yellow if he played enough to qualify for league leaders;
3.) If a player led the league in a category (such as Home Runs), the report will look this up and change the color of that cell to yellow

There are a few other examples as well. The second example is formatted on literally thousands of rows of formulas.

Again, I want to retain this functionality.