File large and Calc unresponsive - despite light content?

[gaufff]

Hi All,

I have a quite basic Calc ods file, with 1 tab, no conditional formatting, very light formatting, and about 20 columns and 55 lines of text (unformatted). Still, the file got 5.5MB large and makes Calc very unresponsive (for example, opening the file or saving it takes almost a minute).

There are only basic “concatenate” formulas with & symbol between text cells.

Do you have any idea what I should check to make this file lighter?

I use it to generate basic SMS text messages, so I don’t need anything else that small pieces of text being concatenated for custom messages génération.

Many thanks!

PS: file can be downloaded and checked at: Unique Download Link | WeTransfer

[mariosv]

Some columns with gray background are formatted up to the bottom of them with a direct format. And row 52 has a bottom border up to column AX.
Cleaning the formats beyond data solve the issue.
Whenever is possible, use styles to format cells.

[gaufff]

Thank you very much @mariosv !
What I don’t get is:

• I did a “format > clear direct formatting” on the entire sheet, everything became unformatted, but the file was still heavy. Why didn’t that make the file lighter?
• why a file gets so heavy with formatting when you ask a background color (for example) to an entire range. I always made the change apply to an entire line or column. Can you please help me understand why it is lighter to create a style and apply it?

Thanks again!

edit: especially since I was doing the exact same on 3 different tabs (background color and some lines) without any big impact of the file size

[mariosv]

Because a lot of cells like columns N,P, etc. are filled with a space.
Your file after cleaning.
largefile.ods (25.2 KB)
Use the backspace to clean those ranges, deleting the whole content.
And for the background on empty cells, better use a cell style, instead of a direct format.

[koyotak]

I discovered the disaster by deleting column after column! Something is wrong with [G], also because its column width, like [H], cannot be set to the default value – mine is 2.26 cm. The file with deleted columns [I–Z] is still 1 MB in size. Your copied file with only virgin text is, as expected, 32 KB in size. The file with deleted [G–Z] is 39 KB. I recommend copying all cells natively, without formatting, into an empty file.
When I tried to save that file with [H–I] as .html, LO crashed. Exporting to .html without [H–I] works perfectly, lightning fast.