Excel pauses when I use the bold cell feature

[Jeff]

When I click on a cell or a row of cells and click on the 'B' Bold
button, Excel pauses for about 10 - 15 seconds with an hour glass. I
can see two-way network traffic occuring during this pause based on
the Windows 2000 connection icon in the system tray. My workstation is
a pentium IV 1700 w/512 MB of Ram and a 30 GB HDD. Any ideas?

 

[Dave Peterson]

I've never seen a delay of 10-15 seconds, but I think I've noticed a slight
delay when you use a font for the first time.

I just figured that excel was bringing the font into memory so it could use it.
But the fonts should be local.




Ah, how about this for a guess: You're using windows 2k. It's a network
printer and when win2k installs the printer, you can either install the drivers
locally or use the network drivers.

I'm betting you're using the network printer drivers. Excel goes to the printer
driver to determine how the display is shown.

Do you have a local printer (with the drivers on your pc)? If yes, can you
change to this printer, start a new workbook, add some text and then bold
something?

See what happens timing-wise.

It still seems pretty exorbitant too me. We use xl2k under win2k at work and I
don't have that kind of delay. Maybe it's time to yell at the IT folks and see
if they can help.

Do you experience any other delays in any other programs--or even opening
files? Maybe there's a hardware problem?????

 

[Jeff]

Wow, fairly good guess. We are using Windows 2k for the workstations,
but our print server is Novell running NDPS. It appears to me that the
drivers are local. Switching the default printer to a local printer
did seem to speed things up.

I wonder if this is somehow related to my printer wizard problem,
where it takes about 10 minutes to load the list of available
printers.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I'm not sure what the printer wizard is, but 10 minutes sound like an eternity
in pc time. (But I get bored fast!)

Any chance that a newer version of the printer drivers (& wizard??) would help.

Maybe enough people complained and they fixed something.