MS Excel Very Slow to Open and Save.

[JCA]

Hi,

I am running MS Excel 2000 on a fairly updated laptop. I
have one excel worksheet file (.xls) that has 29 pages
total used and is about 360kb total in size. The document
is mostly all text entries.

My problem is that it is getting slower and slower to save
and open. Is there any solutions? It takes 20 - 60
seconds to open or save. Other excel documents, with a
lot of tabs (20 - 30 sheets but only about 160kb in size)
open and save quickly and fine. Is the file just getting
too large?

Please help. Thank you, John.

 

[Hans]

Hi,

you may find some tips for speeding up excel on:

http://www.decisionmodels.com/optspeed.htm
(choose Bottlenecks/size, top right corner)

It sometimes also helps (at least it did for me in the
past) to save your workbook under a new name.

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi John,
There have been quite a few problems reported recently with
single workbooks, or single worksheets. Most have been referred
to my site or to Charles Williams site. But one thing that has been
lacking is feedback. There are no specific solutions
to these types of problems, and even more so when you do not
have a specific cause of a problem already identified. Your
feedback is important. Even though some specific areas may
be mentioned the chances are that your problem is something else,
but possibly covered elsewhere on a site. Your feedback is important.

Since you identify your problem to a single workbook, and possibly
double the size, I would check for the following things first.
-- end cell location Ctrl+End if that identifies a location way past
your actual data then you want to fix last cell problems.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/lastcell.htm#resetall
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/lastcell.htm#makelastcell
-- storing file as compatible between versions of Excel doubles the
size of the file and increases calculation time. Don't do it. If that
is something you did, you can Save As once more to simply save as
Microsoft Excel workbook (.xls)

If you can identify your problem to a single worksheet, I would
concentrate on looking at formulas involving a range of cells or
array formulas.

On my site an example of misuse of the SUM Worksheet Formula
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/slowresp.htm#
http://google.com/groups?as_umsgid=ugDxrXayCHA.2592@TK2MSFTNGP10

On Charles Williams site examples of SUMIF and array formula
that could be rewritten.
http://www.decisionmodels.com/optspeedk.htm
(best viewed with Mozilla, *not* with IE)

Other problems you might have with a single sheet are Event macros
associated with a single worksheet. You can read about at
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/events.htm
but if you don't know what they are then you wouldn't have written such code.

 

[JCA]

Thanks. I tried using the website below. The suggessions
weren't able to solve my problem. The workbook is used to
hold text entries only, no calculations. It takes a long
time to open and save. It is only 360kb in size. Does
anyone have any other suggesstions. Thanks for your help..

 

[Dave Peterson]

It's kind of difficult to suggest stuff since you didn't say what you said
(exactly).

But did you close excel and clean up your windows temp folder.

windows Start button|Run
%temp%
ok

is a quick way to get to the temp folder.

Does this slowness occur when you do a File|open (excel already running) or if
you double click on the *.xls file and have excel start.

If xl is closed and you double click the file, it may not be that workbook
that's causing the trouble. Maybe it's your toolbar (*.xlb).

Try renaming all your *.xlb files to *.xlbOLD (with excel closed). (Use windows
start button|Search/Find to locate these.)

*.xlb is where excel stores customized toolbars. Sometimes that can slow down
excel when it's opening.

If that works, then delete those *.xlbOLD files and recreate any customizations
to your toolbars.