How can I find out which parts of an Excel workbook are the biggest in size?

Didn't mean to answer my own question but I found out how to do it afterwards. So here's the deal:

  1. First, make a copy of the file, rename it as .zip, open it and navigate to [zipfile]\xl\worksheets\ There you'll see the .xml files with their uncompressed size. For instance: Excel workbook structure example

  2. Identify the biggest worksheet, in this case sheet6.xml

  3. Open the file [zipfile]\xl\_rels\workbook.xml.rels and find out the corresponding relationship id of the previously identified worksheet.xml. In this case the r:id of sheet6.xml is 10: Excel workbook structure example

  4. Open the file [zipfile]\xl\workbook.xml. Using the rid of the big .xml file you got above and the structure of workbook.xml (shown below), find out the name of the big sheet in your workbook.

Excel workbook structure example


I am unable to Comment (not enough points) but I used this in addition to the Awesome answer provided by S_A to get my bloated file from 75mb down to 1.7mb...

I had NEVER heard of the "Clean Excess Cell Formatting" feature before... (BTW, it's part of Excel, not a 3rd-party product...)

Sorry for submitting this as an answer, but I wanted to tell you about this helpful tool, and thank you for your helpful discussion! Hoping to get enough points someday to participate...

Edit: at the recommendation of robinCTS, I'm going to quickly show how to enable/access this tool from within Excel

Helpfully Annotated Screenshot of instructions from provided link