title: After debugging VBA code, excel filesize is inexplicably large
body: <h2>The problem</h2>
  
  <p>Although one might assume this is a de rigeur problem with a mismanaged workbook, please hear me out. I'm working with a relatively modest (80-100kb) excel file. It has minimal formatting, very few formulas, and it's vba code doesn't do anything too fancy. I've been working with vba for a few months now and have had this problem exactly once before. As this tool will be used in producing reports for a while to come, and as I've limited time, I'd rather not rebuild the whole thing or turn in an unwieldy project.</p>
  
  <h2>Details</h2>
  
  <p>My code loops through several dozen 200+kb .xls files using Workbooks.Open method and grabs 1-2 values depending on what it's opened. It's been working through over a half dozen iterations with no change in size. In my latest version it's balloned from 100kb to 10mb. No tabs have been added, I've looked extensively for all sorts of formatting and other traditional pitfalls—it's not my first rodeo in that respect. I am new-ish to vba though, and so often step through code and have to pause or stop debugging before resuming to correct syntax. Sometimes this will happen before any Workbooks.Close method.</p>
  
  <p>I think, inexplicably, during some combination of saves/crashes/debugging, excel has 'saved' some of the opened workbooks in this file's memory. It gets weirder: if I copy all of my worksheets, as well as my code, to a new workbook, the file size falls back down to 100kb or so. I've had this problem once before. Using a 20kb workbook I was trying to pull values from a 135mb workbook; after one save I noticed that my workbook was now 135mb and change, and I was only able to get it back down to 20kb by copying everything one sheet at a time to a new workbook. Does anyone know what's going on?</p>
  
  <p>Attempting to google this produces dozens of pages on extraneous formatting, formulas, and VBA code unrelated to my issue.</p>
  
  <p>I could post pseudo-code if it would be useful to see, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too enlightening, and that my problem is some memory issue that occurs between .Open and .Close methods.</p>
  
  <p>Edit: after looking through some of the workbooks that I'm opening, quite a few of them are 'around' 10mb. It seems suspicious to me that my tool would increase in size by about as much as one of the .xlsx files I'm opening.</p>