Have you ever been so unlucky to have to work with a small Excel file, less than 1MB of size, but that takes more than 700MB of RAM once opened, and that makes Excel so slow that is barely usable?

 

It happened to me, and to all the people on this post and similar on the TechNet website. What if you try to use all of their solution without success? I will explain you what I did.

 

The scenario was the following, Microsoft Excel 2010, with the latest Service Pack, which worked perfectly, except for a series of files that we received regularly from a colleague abroad. They were simply a table with less than 20 rows and a dozen of columns; the only computation was a sum between the values of a single column. However, the file once opened occupied more than 700MB of RAM and was slow to manage.

 

None of the solution that I found online worked; therefore, I opted for a workaround, I tried to save the file from xlsx to slk, and then to save it back to xlsx. It worked, you just lose a few of the decorations of the page, but the data are safe and the memory usage under control.

 

Probably it is not the best solution, but if none of the others works for you, you can try this workaround.

 

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