matt770 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Shot in the dark that someone here might have a clue what's happening here. I'm stumped. I've got a workbook that contains status of customer orders. It has 6 tabs, 5 of which hold about 30-40 rows of data, and the 6th holds about 1,000. As Excel workbooks go, it's not exactly pushing the envelope, size-wise. Each week one of our guys based on Europe sends me his version of the workbook for me to update the master version. He maintains two out of the 6 tabs, so I copy and paste his tabs onto the corresponding tabs on the master sheet, then I send it to a bunch of people for our weekly review. Today it crashed when I tried to paste one of the updated tabs to the master sheet -- it just hung there for a while until I had to shut it down. I saved the master workbook, rebooted, then reopened Excel. The entire book was corrupted -- every cell had #VALUE where a datapoint used to be. So, I went into my last saved version and decided to delete anything older than 2011 from the 1,000+ tab, thinking maybe the book had gotten too big. Here is where things get weird -- deleting all those lines only reduced the size from 5.4MB to 4.6MB. But then I looked at the previous weeks' sheets that I had sent out, and each week it had grown by roughly 1MB, even though we only add 1-5 rows per week. The sheet I sent on 9/7 was 2.7MB...9/14: 3.2MB...9/21: 4.4MB....9/28: 5.6MB. Pretty freaking bizarre. I'm thinking Europe dude may have a virus, or our Excel versions are not compatible somehow. Anyone ever experience anything like this?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rajncajn Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 (edited) Sounds like it's picking up data from his spreadsheet (marcros or links maybe?) that are not readily visible. So when you move or copy it to your sheet it can't find the reference it's looking for. Try highlighting, copying & pasting the data itself rather than the whole tab and when you paste use paste special > values so that you are sure the text is the only thing you're getting. Edited October 5, 2011 by rajncajn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T_bone65 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Where is Whomper when you need him Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt770 Posted October 5, 2011 Author Share Posted October 5, 2011 Yep, Europe dude's data is a mess. Any time I try to do anything in his tab, I get a lag. We try to save a few bucks and I swear these people give us nothing but headaches. And don't try to reach anyone at 5:01PM their time, they're all on the train or in the pub. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt770 Posted October 5, 2011 Author Share Posted October 5, 2011 Sounds like it's picking up data from his spreadsheet (marcros or links maybe?) that are not readily visible. So when you move or copy it to your sheet it can't find the reference it's looking for. Try highlighting, copying & pasting the data itself rather than the whole tab and when you paste use paste special > values so that you are sure the text is the only thing you're getting. This does work, thanks. I have to re-format his tabs which is a huge pain, but at least I have a sheet that doesn't crash. If his sheet does this again next week, I'm going to see about getting him sh!tcanned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt770 Posted October 5, 2011 Author Share Posted October 5, 2011 Wow, after removing the formatting, it's down to 169K. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yukon Cornelius Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Yep, Europe dude's data is a mess. Any time I try to do anything in his tab, I get a lag. We try to save a few bucks and I swear these people give us nothing but headaches. And don't try to reach anyone at 5:01PM their time, they're all on the train or in the pub. thats the way it should be . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt770 Posted October 5, 2011 Author Share Posted October 5, 2011 thats the way it should be . Well yeah, but when your American bosses overload you with work and your "colleagues" can just blow stuff off, it gets old quick. A year ago when I decided to move back to Atlanta, I was excited to see all my old coworkers again. Since then, 90% of them have been laid off or were placed in other areas of the business in anticipation of the "reorg". Their replacements have to be reminded over and over to send me some really simple updates every week. The emails are ignored, so I send them instant messages one by one. "Oh yes!! Okay, it is on the way!!". But I digress. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Country Posted October 6, 2011 Share Posted October 6, 2011 His sheet is likely loaded with formulas, external references, formatting stuff, etc. For it to grow like that, probably has a bunch of pivot tables duplicating the data etc. Check for hidden sheets, etc. But, looks like you have a workable soultion in C&Ping values. Re the reformatting, i you have a row that is formatted as you want it, you can always copy the row then paste special -> formatting . Should save you the time of manually reformatting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt770 Posted October 6, 2011 Author Share Posted October 6, 2011 His sheet is likely loaded with formulas, external references, formatting stuff, etc. For it to grow like that, probably has a bunch of pivot tables duplicating the data etc. Check for hidden sheets, etc. But, looks like you have a workable soultion in C&Ping values. Re the reformatting, i you have a row that is formatted as you want it, you can always copy the row then paste special -> formatting . Should save you the time of manually reformatting. Yep, did that and it's good now. What is difficult for me to understand is how/why all that crap would be in his sheet. We're talking about a simple status sheet with text manually typed into cells -- no formulas or external references needed. And this guy wouldn't know how to do that stuff anyway. His last day is tomorrow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azazello1313 Posted October 6, 2011 Share Posted October 6, 2011 Where is Whomper when you need him Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whomper Posted October 6, 2011 Share Posted October 6, 2011 (edited) His sheet is likely loaded with formulas, external references, formatting stuff, etc. For it to grow like that, probably has a bunch of pivot tables duplicating the data etc. Check for hidden sheets, etc. But, looks like you have a workable soultion in C&Ping values. Re the reformatting, i you have a row that is formatted as you want it, you can always copy the row then paste special -> formatting . Should save you the time of manually reformatting. ETA BC beat me to it Edited October 6, 2011 by whomper Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rajncajn Posted October 6, 2011 Share Posted October 6, 2011 ETA BC rajn beat me to it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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