Excel

File Operations

Quick Save

Macabacus' Quick Save tools save workbooks without recalculating, regardless of your calculation settings. This considerably reduces the amount of time spent saving a file, particularly in workbooks with tables that are slow to calculate when saving using native Excel functionality.

Other File Operations

Merge Workbooks

Macacbacus' Merge Workbooks tool lets you combine sheets from multiple workbooks into a single workbook and optionally rename the sheets in the merged workbook according to your preferences. Access this tool from the Macabacus > File menu.

Workbook Optimization

Macabacus' workbook optimization tools keep your models healthy, reducing file size and improving stability and performance. As a rule of thumb, workbooks should generally remain below 1Mb in file size (unless they include huge data dumps). Larger file sizes often indicate a problem that Macabacus can fix.

Name Scrubber

Your models can accumulate hundreds or even tens of thousands of defined names over time, which can inflate the file size of your workbooks, make them unstable, and slow down some operations. Many of these names are added by data add-ins like FactSet and Capital IQ but are not necessarily used, and most are hidden so you would never even know about them. Excel's Name Manager will not show you hidden names, making it impossible to discover and manage them natively, and may not even open in workbooks containing too many names.

Macabacus' Name Scrubber shows you hidden names and lets you delete names safely, without #REF! errors that can occur when deleting names natively. Name Scrubber can delete all range names with broken references (#REF!), unused names that refer to constants or arrays, and/or all hidden names at once, and can delete tens of thousands of such names in under one minute.

Name Scrubber, accessed from the Macabacus > File > Optimize menu, lets you do some other things Name Manager does not, including:

• Show and navigate cells (dependencies) whose formulas reference selected names;
• Text search for names with autosuggest functionality (useful when searching a large collection of names);
• Use filters to view only the names you want—visible, hidden, erroneous, linked, or unused;
• Apply names to formulas, replacing cell references with names;
• Unapply names in formulas, replacing names with the cell references to avoid #REF! errors; and
• Hide and unhide names.

Style Scrubber

Workbooks can accumulate thousands of unused Excel styles over time, bloating file size and making workbooks unstable. 65,000+ styles is the workbook limit, and it is surprisingly common to reach that limit. Excel only lets you delete styles one-by-one, requiring hours, months, or years (if you are so inclined) to manually delete all unused styles. Macabacus solves this problem, letting you delete many Excel styles at once using the Style Scrubber dialog accessed from the Macabacus > File > Optimize menu.

There are free utilities that can also remove multiple styles at once, but they share two major deficiencies with Excel's native style removal capabilities: (a) they cannot delete corrupt styles, and (b) they delete all custom styles, including those that are in use, which may require extensive reformatting.

The Style Scrubber dialog shows you which styles are used and which are not, so that you don't unintentionally delete styles in use. If Macabacus cannot delete a style upon the first attempt, the style is likely corrupt. Corrupt styles often have names that include foreign or non-standard characters. Macabacus will prompt you to perform a Deep Clean to remove corrupt styles. Deep Clean creates a copy of the active workbook and removes corrupt styles from the copied workbook.

Clean Used Ranges

This tool forces Excel to recalculate used ranges on each worksheet to reduce file size and possibly improve the performance of some Excel add-ins, including Macabacus. Click the Macabacus > File > Optimize > Clean Used Ranges button to run this utility.

This documentation refers to Macabacus version 8.14.5. Some features and descriptions of these features may not
apply to older versions of Macabacus. Update your Macabacus software to take advantage of the latest features.