File Size Conundrum

[largeselection]

So I have an excel file with 350,000 rows of data (I'm using excel 2010) and I need to create a bunch of tabs with some pivot tables to recap the data in meaningful ways. I've created one tab already, but the file size is quite large (115MB). Is my best course of action to just deal with a huge file? Or do you know of other methods to dealing with this problem. I thought perhaps I would create the pivot tables in a different workbook and reference the data in the first workbook, but that seemed to be worse. Everytime it tried to connect to the data it crashed excel. Any ideas? Anyone encounter this issue and figure out a good method of dealing with it? I don't want to use powerpivot because not everyone who will be using it will have that installed.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Anthony47]

Pivot table tends to dramatically increase the size of the file. You may reduce this effect by:
-rightclick the area of a table
-Options
-uncheck "save the data with the layout" and check "Update on opening" (Beware: your messages could be different, I am not working with the English version)
-Ok

It will take its time recalculating the tables, but should save the size of the file.

Hth
Bye

 

[largeselection]

Thanks for the suggestion I'll definitely have to try that. What about creating a connection to the file via ms query? Would that help?