When I save it in .htm format it is only 70KB!

The problem – Although I only have 400 rows and 10 columns, I have 250 tabs! I know this is a lame way to use excel, but what other options are out there? Do you see my problem – 250 sheets, and 99% of the cells are empty! Why can’t I remove those extra rows and columns? ? ?

Yes – I know, I would put all the data in one sheet, but I need the seperation.

Thanks!

In a sense, the product of rows*cells is already limited by the amount of memory you have in your computer.

Making this explicit would end up being pretty complex: As an example, consider the case of transposing an 100,000×10 array in a spreadsheet with a 1,000,000 cell (rows*cols) limit. Transposing the array requires writing values into cells that “don’t exist” prior to the transpose operation. This opens up the question of when those cells come into being…

The Excel approach of ‘every cell exists all the time, and memory gets allocated as required’ avoids these semantic hassles.

-Mike

With 30k formatted characters in a cell, we’ll see Excel used as a word processor more than ever, too. My sister-in-law told me this weekend that she did her resume in Excel, because she could control the layout better than in Word. I’m thinking, “Merged cells, gaaa!”

- Jon

With the number of rows now very high, excel will be used like a database – even more than it is today! – this will put the demands up.

I know that MS have been splitting there products out, but i can’t see why, excel and acess could not share more of the same feauture – people are keen to point out that one is a RDMS and one a SS, but if the 2 things are close to each other, why not stick them together – or at least up in some features from each other?

what about this?

Msgbox “You seem to have a lot of data in your workbook which may slow down your systems performace. You can use Excels query wizard to help speed things up”

maybe one day!

I’m pretty sure that most users aren’t aware of their filesizes, even now.

As an example, I see lots of bloated worksheets which contain hardly any data, just a lot of formatting rules extended thousands of rows.
The 2MB XLS reduces to 50KB. You just saved close to 2MB! but the user doesn’t see the significance.

It’s only when mail servers return “attachment too big” errors that they pay attention – perhaps by compressing them.

Some users are better than others, so I may be generalising a little.

Excel 12 compression should help on diskspace, but it’s cheap as dirt anyway.

I’d pay more attention to the data crunchers. Those users who are intelligent, deal with a lot of data but have limited Excel know-how.
While their spreadsheets will work, they’ll reproduce functionality which Excel could already provide with little-known functions…. take the power behind SUMPRODUCT and MATCH/INDEX for example.