*.csv Increase the file size

Question

Looking for help with this issue.

I have an excel file of size 5.7 MB, when I save the file as csv it will increase to 14.3 MB! When I click on the created csv file and save it again as csv, the size will be reduced to 1KB!

My question, is there a way to save my Excel file directly to csv and strip out all formatting so that it will be save as 1KB csv file?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A CSV file will often be larger than the XLSX it was created from. This is because in XLSX is a actually a compressed (zipped) file - you can unzip it with a standard compression tool and check it out for yourself.

You will see smaller XLSX files if there is a lot of repeat data. XLSX actually pulls out every text value, stores it in a lookup table, and then replaces it with a smaller reference number to the lookup table. This means that it only has to use up space once per text string (a little more than "once" because of the references, but still much less space).

A CSV file will list every occurrence in full which takes up much more space. I've seen files balloon to 10x the size after saving to CSV. The only time you should expect a savings with a CSV is if there is a lot of formatting and not too much reused text. Then the CSV strips out the formatting and the final product is smaller.

In reference to your 1KB file, that's a placeholder temporary file while the OS loads data to the final version. After the save is complete, it will be the same size as the other CSV. Either that, or the file is corrupt.