Excel’s New Feature for Speeding Up Spreadsheets
Microsoft is introducing a Check Performance feature in Excel to help improve spreadsheet performance by identifying and removing unnecessary formatting in empty cells. Over time, a spreadsheet can accumulate empty cells that still retain formatting or style information, such as fill colors or text alignment, which can increase file size and slow down the system.
This feature is currently available in Excel Online for paid Microsoft 365 subscribers and is expected to roll out to Excel for Windows and Mac in the future.
Key Points:
- Empty cells with leftover formatting: Even when a cell doesn’t contain any data, it can still take up space if it holds unwanted formatting.
- Performance impact: These hidden formats can slow down performance and increase the file size.
- Check Performance feature: This tool scans for empty cells with formatting and provides an option to clear them, reducing the file size and improving performance.
- File size reduction: In an example, a file with over a million empty cells shrank from 3.14 MB to just 17.5 KB after clearing unnecessary formatting.
- Manual use: The feature doesn’t run automatically, meaning you’ll have control over whether to clear the formatting or not.
Microsoft plans to expand this feature and is investigating additional problems that might be detected and resolved with Check Performance.