User FAQs

If you have a question, please send it to us.

1) Is there any Microsoft documentation for Excel ?

link - support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel 

2) Is there a forum for questions about Excel ?
Post your questions in the Microsoft Q&A forum with the topic "office-excel-itpro".

link - docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/topics/office-excel-itpro.html 

There is also a forum on techcommunity. The Excel hub forum with the label "Macros and VBA".

link - techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-excel/ct-p/Excel_Cat 

There is also a forum on Microsoft Community.

link - answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel 

There is also a forum on Stack Overflow with the tag "vba".

link - stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vba 

There are also two very popular independent forums.

link - excelforum.com 
link - mrexcel.com/board/ 

3) What is the difference between the file extensions '.xlsx' and '.xlsm' ?
.xlsx - an XML based default file format.
.xlsm - an XML based file format that can contain macros.

4) What is the '.xlsb' file format ?
This is a binary based file format that can contain macros but not ribbon customisations.

5) Are there any advantages or disadvantages to saving a workbook with the '.xlsb' file extension ?
*) File size might be smaller
*) Read from and Write to is faster
*) Formulas larger than 8192 characters can be saved
*) The individual files contained in the xml zip package are compressed binary files and not readable xml.
*) Power Query cannot read data saved in an XLSB workbook.

6) Is there a way to force Excel to always use manual calculation ?
Yes. Create an Excel template the filename Book.xltx and save it in one of the startup folders.

7) Is there a way to close all my open workbooks at once without having to close them one at a time ?
Yes. Hold down Shift and click on the X (cross) in the top right corner of one of the open workbooks (or windows).

8) What is the largest Excel file you can have ?
Either for a single workbook or a combination of open workbooks.
32 Bit - Excel 2013 / 2016 - 2 GB of memory.
64 Bit - Excel 2013 / 2016 - no hard limit. Workbook size is limited only by available memory and system resources.

9) What changes could you make to reduce the file size of a workbook ?
*) Check the last used cell on each worksheet and delete any redundant blank rows and columns.
*) Check for hidden worksheets and remove out of date sheets.
*) Compress or remove images and pictures.
*) Reduce the size of pivot tables.
*) Optimise formulas and remove array formulas.
*) Remove any unnecessary formatting and use consistent formatting across worksheets.
*) Remove conditional formatting.

10) Why is my workbook recalculating before saving ?
When the calculation is set to Manual, the default setting is to automatically recalculate before the file is saved.
This can be changed on the Options Formulas tab

11) What are the differences between OneDrive and SharePoint ?
OneDrive is your personal cloud storage (although you can still share files)
SharePoint is your collaborative cloud storage (can include files from Outlook, Teams and Yammer)