Split Excel files without losing formatting
You split the master file, open the output — and the title bar is gone, the currency column shows raw numbers, the header colors vanished. Now you're reformatting 50 files by hand. Why does this keep happening?
Why splitters break formatting
Most tools (including scripts built on common libraries, and AI chatbots using pandas) work by reading your data out and writing a new file. Data survives that round trip; formatting mostly doesn't. Merged cells unmerge, conditional formats disappear, column widths reset. One popular web splitter even documents it plainly: "table structure is not preserved."
The approach that preserves everything
The alternative is to clone the original workbook and delete the rows that don't belong. Nothing is regenerated, so there's nothing to lose: title merges, fills, borders, number formats, freeze panes, and conditional formatting rules all remain exactly as you built them. This is how ReportSplit works.
One honest caveat: formulas
When rows move up, formulas that referenced deleted rows would silently point at the wrong cells. ReportSplit freezes formulas to their last calculated values in the output — which is also safer for distribution: a live formula referencing another branch's rows is an information leak waiting to happen.