Numbers for iOS is bloating my documents

I just bought Numbers for iOS today and, as the title says, I am getting some serious file bloat when using it on my iPhone.

When I upload my Numbers spreadsheet from my Mac to iCloud, it is 957 kb in size, and I can see that the size is unchanged in iCloud at this point. When I open it in Numbers on my iPhone, I get a couple of error messages (“Numbers doesn’t support some aspects of the original spreadsheet: All comments were removed; Sheet settings, such as headers and footers, were removed”. I have gotten these error messages on my Mac with this document since I converted it from Excel months ago and have had no problems despite weekly use). Then, when I close the doc on my iPhone and it syncs with iCloud, it takes several minutes and the size of the file jumps to 12 MB! If I open it in Numbers my Mac and resync, it is now down to 1.1 MB. Then opening and syncing it in my iPhone makes it 12 MB again.

I thought maybe Numbers just can’t handle this one spreadsheet, so I made a test document out of one of Number’s samples to see if it would happen with a different spreadsheet. It was originally 165 kb. (By the way, I got some errors when opening that on my iPhone, too.) When I closed this doc on my phone, voila, it’s jumped to 628 kb on iCloud. I can understand a small size increase, but this is a bit much.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Numbers on my iPhone, but no improvement.

For what it is worth, I am running iOS 6 on my iPhone 4S and Numbers ’09 on my Mac, all with the most current updates.

Is anyone else running into this? I could try to ignore it, but downloading a 12 MB file on my mobile takes quite a while on my DSL at home and will probably be totally unreasonable on cellular. I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and bought Numbers for my iPhone today to try this out before investing in an iPad to use for this, but it doesn’t look good.