Methods and Systems in accordance with the present invention provide a file format for storing spreadsheets compactly on PDAs. PDAs only contain a limited amount of computer memory due to their small size and processing ability. To reduce memory constraints caused by PDA spreadsheet applications, the present invention reduces memory allocated for file storage by optimizing the compression of individual spreadsheet files within a database record storage system. This method and system in accordance with the present invention uses a collection of records to represent a spreadsheet file.