# Microsoft Office Application Help - Excel Help forum > Excel Formulas & Functions >  >  How to compress excel file.

## st_judeu@yahoo.com

Good day all,
please I have an excel file that is up to 36 MB. Please how can I compress it to 1MB or less without affecting its contents.
Thanks.

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## MarvinP

Hi St_judeu,

If you save the file from an .xls to the newer format of .xlsx (using Excel 2007 or 2010) it will compress it for you.  If you are already saving it in .xlsx format we need to talk more.

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## squiggler47

I would suspect that 36:1 is an optimistic ammount to want to compress a file! more realistic would be 2:1 to 4:1! You would only get larger compression if your work book contains large ammounts of redundant data, IE perhaps your workbook has addresses where the same town, county, country are repeated a lot even then 36:1 is a lot!

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## squiggler47

If you need to compress to 1mb because of an e-mail attachment limit, you could use WinRar, Winzip or 7zip to compress the file and split into 1mb chunks! This will enable you to send 36 individual parts that can be re-combined at the other end with the same program.

note 7zip is free, the others are not they will also shrink the file to the smallest losless size they can before splitting the file!

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## st_judeu@yahoo.com

The file contains daily transactions from 1st to 31st day of the month. The opening balances are linked to the previous day's closing balances. Customers' list and list of banks have validation. Could the links and validation increase the file size? What will I do to reduce the size to 1MB? Sorry for bothering you. Thanks.

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## st_judeu@yahoo.com

The file contains daily transactions from 1st to 31st day of the month. The opening balances are linked to the previous day's closing balances. Customers' list and list of banks have validation. Could the links and validation increase the file size? What will I do to reduce the size to 1MB? Sorry for bothering you. Thanks.

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