Not so Useful

There are two things in my life right now: work and cycling. I've got a great project at work . I'm building an Excel based model to estimate the water quality in an open pit mine once mining has ended and there is a lake in the open pit. I say estimate rather than predict because (to me) prediction implies a precision that is unreasonable given the variation in the model inputs and the assumptions necessary to make the calculations.

Regardless, the model is being built and the file size is HUGE. It's at 50 MB and only 3 of the 10 parameters for the first scenario have been completed. It's way to big to email or put on an ftp site for my senior reviewers to get and is getting unwieldy to work with. The model isn't geochemically complex but there are a number of VLOOKUP and nested IF functions. and it does run on a monthly time step for 300 years. Our company has an internal microsoft support person. I thought maybe she could tell me what is acting as the suck for the file size, thinking that if I know what is causing the file to balloon then I can try to restructure the model. The response from our internal support landed me in a Dilbert cartoon. She suggested that I burn the file to CD when I'm done and even offered to help walk me through the process to burn the data file......