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.

Workbook Optimization

Name Scrubber

Your models can accumulate thousands of defined names over time, the vast majority of which you do not use or even know about. These excess names can inflate the file size of your workbooks and make them unstable. If you use FactSet, Capital IQ, or similar data add-ins, your workbooks will likely contain dozens or hundreds of hidden names placed there but not used by those add-ins. Excel's Name Manager will not show you hidden names, making it impossible to manage those names natively.

Macabacus' Name Scrubber addresses many of the limitations associated with Excel's native Name Manager, and provides advanced functionality related to defined names, letting you:

• Search for names containing specified text, with autosuggest functionality (useful when searching a large collection of names);
• Remove unused names from your workbooks;
• Use filters to view the names you want—visible, hidden, erroneous, linked, or unused;
• View hidden names;
• Apply names to formulas, replacing cell references with names;
• Unapply names in formulas, replacing names with the cell references;
• Hide and unhide names;
• Trace dependencies for names in your workbooks (a useful check before deleting names to avoid #REF! errors); and
• Navigate to cells using selected names in their formulas.

Access Name Scrubber from the Macabacus > File > Optimize menu.

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 8.8.15, and may differ from the PDF documentation
on your computer that installed with your version of Macabacus.