Large excel file problem when moved from 2003 to 2007

[Pieman]

I have a file with a large amount of weather and flow data that is presented
in many diagrams using excel 2003. The file is 32 MB. The diagrams have
displayed relatively fast and I´ve had no problems with the file being open
at the same time as GIS, cad and other relatively demanding programs.
I opened the file in 2007 and then moved to a diagram. The RAM usage
increased imediately from 700 mb to 1,3 GB and increased another 300 MB for
every diagram. Drawing the diagram took about 30 seconds and eventually the
RAM limit was exhuasted and excel crashed. When I saved the file in xlsx
format the file size was 10 MB.
What is going on? Is there a conversion program missing?

 

[JLatham]

This is not 'something going wrong' other than a really poorly implemented
graphic engine in Excel 2007.

One of my earliest experiences with Excel 2007 involved graphing and it was
basically a disaster also. Others have noted the shortcomings of 2007's
charting, which include a time to complete that is orders of magnitude
greater than what it took under earlier versions of Excel, even on systems
with less powerful/fast CPUs and less physical memory available. In that
experience we were able to read spectrograph data and create 52 graphs from
it in under 2 minutes in Excel 2003, the same task took over 10 minutes on
Excel 2007 and even failed if we attempted to place all graphs on a single
sheet with the data. The client went back to 2003.

Wish I had better news for you, but I don't. Perhaps someone else will come
along with something I've not heard about in the way of work-arounds or
outright fixes and make both of us much happier campers.

 

[Pieman]

Thanks a lot. At least I know the cause now. I will probably have to
uninstall 2007 and go back to 2003 as the graphs are vital to me. I just cant
work with it this way.

 

[Pieman]

I just installed the Office suite service pack 2 for 2007. The graphs are
working like they did in 2003..... so far. Hope it helps you.

 

[JLatham]

That's good news - there were some changes made in that service pack that
were supposed to help, although myself and some others really didn't see the
change. Glad you did!