Excel (2003)
3 Questions

I often copy & paste images from the internet to decorate my personal files.

On my BUDGET spreadsheet I copy & pasted my bank's logo, deleting the hyperlink. At the end of a budget period I copy and paste the logo onto a new line and create the budget. After a number of budgets I delete old lines (rows).

One day I changed the logo image I use. When I deleted old lines I saw the old image was still there. I cut the image and it was still there. I cut it again, and again, and again, and realized when I deleted old lines the image stayed put - I had to cut it before deleting the row. I had a lot of cutting to do before I deleted the whole "stack" of images.

I also use Excel for files that have nothing to do numbers. For my daily things-to-do list I created a template of 7 columns (1 week). I copy & pasted an image from the internet to decorate the first row of each column. (It's the same image for each column.)

To create a new week's worth of to-do lists, I copy & paste the 7 template columns onto the next 7 columns. At the end of the week I copy & paste another 7 columns, review the previous 7 to see if there's anything I need to transfer to the new week, then delete the previous 7.

Occasionally I copy & paste images from the internet to represent activities on my list. If the activity goes on for a while it will get copy & pasted from one column to another a lot, and the image will get moved up or down the spreadsheet as I rearrange the order I want to do things on a given day.

One day I noticed images staying put and realized I had to cut them before deleting the column.

At present I have the image that decorates line 1 of each used column of the spreadsheet, and another image that will occupy a specific line of each used column for some time, so I have included that image on the template as well. There are also two images that I cut and paste from column to column day by day.

At any time, the most text information I have on the spreadsheet is 21 columns of 10 lines, with one of those columns having up to 50 lines. Not a lot of information, but one day this spreadsheet starting s l o w i n g d o w n. Click on a cell and it takes t i m e to highlight. Click to generate a menu to cut or paste or change font type or size, and it takes t i m e to generate the list, click the function you wish to use and it takes time to highlight, it takes time for the change to occur. The same is true if you want to insert a line, delete a line, etc. It can take 30 seconds to save, and close to a minute to close.

I've been cutting the special image day by day, but never gave a thought to the image on line 1. Testing by cutting any image in any column reveals that none of the images are actually "stacked". Cut an image once, and it's cut, there's nothing "underneath".

So, Question #1 is: Is there any difference between deleting columns and rows in terms of the copy & pasted images getting deleted along with the column or row?

Question #2 is: Why do some images get deleted when the column is deleted and some don't?

I had about 7 other small worksheets in this file, none of them numerical. Thinking these spreadsheets might contribute to slowing the saving/closing time I moved some to another file. There are 4 left, at most 10 columns wide by 20 lines long. One has 5 cut and pasted images, and one has 4 CELLS with website links. Nothing heavy content wise in any of these spreadsheets, though briefly speed did increase when I LOWERED the number of spreadsheets.

Question #3: Is this spreadsheet possessed? Do you think I have a virus in this spreadsheet?
I EXPERIMENTED by recreating the worksheet without copying and pasting: seven columns, about 10 cells of text each.

Looking at the new spreadsheet I noticed the old one was more than 30 times the size in kb, a much greater amount than I would have expected for a spreadsheet apparently holding very little information.

I copied and pasted the small images I had originally gotten from the internet onto a blank Word document. From Word I copied and pasted the images onto my new spreadsheet.

I copied and pasted the first seven columns of the new spreadsheet onto the next 7 columns, and typed in all the information (about 20 cells of text) from the old spreadsheet onto the new - no copying and pasting.

I copied and pasted those 7 columns onto the next 7, then deleted the 7 columns I had just copied by highlighting the top row and doing "delete columns". I did this 3 more times, saved, closed the file and checked the number of kb's. Instead of staying the same, the amount of kb's had gone up.

I copied, pasted, and deleted the 7 columns again, 4 times, by selected the columns instead of the top row of cells, and the number of kb's still went up.

I tried copying and pasting and cutting pictures one by one, 4 times, and the kb's went up.

I tried copying and pasting then "deleting contents" before deleting the columns, did that 4 times, and the kb's still went up.

After many more iterations I noticed a thin red line at the left side of one of my cells. I clicked it and dragged it and it was one of my pictures, and the line was still there. I clicked it and dragged it and the red line was still there, proof positive that whether you delete rows or columns, images do not get deleted with the other contents. I hadn't noticed this on my original spreadsheet because it's the first 7 columns, not the second 7, that I actually copy and paste, and the original 7 columns carry only 1 copy of each image. The space I'm pasting into actually has many copies of the images, but they're compressed.

So I tried clicking on each picture and going through Format, Properties to change to don't move with cells, but this is not a happy solution because I want 1 iteration to be copied and then be deleted when I delete the column.

There seems to be only a choice of accumulating stacks of images or not copying the pictures.





I have never engaged in such heavy use of images in Excel, so I'll just make a general comment. I think you're creating some problems by doing so much copying/inserting of images into Excel. If you could limit the use of images to header areas in your worksheets, as opposed to using them on many rows below the header area, I think you'd have a less problem-prone procedure.

On a technical point, if you want to CONTINUE this practice, resizing your images with Paint or an image editor before using them in Excel might help.