Excel extremely slow

[RDJ]

I have Office 2007 on XP SP#3 system. When entering any data into a
cell, even a single character, excel hesitates as it calculates for 5
to 10 seconds before it allows me to move on. The problem began when I
first tried linking a spreadhseet to others. I have since wiped my C
drive and reinstalled everything to no avail - the problem is still
there. Treid many things, one of the more obvious is to go into
options and disable calculations and links and so on, but when changes
are made to the options Excel does not seem to acknowledge it. When I
go into options again the check boxes I selected are back to the way
they were! It is quite maddening. The core problem is the slow re-
computation upon input. I have purchased the microsoft products and I
am not satisfied with them all because of this stupid problem. Makes
it hard to say nice things about microsoft products, as much as I'd
really like to. Mind you this spreadhseet worked fine before I tried
the linking and then it all went to hell.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

I have Office 2007 on XP SP#3 system. When entering any data into a
cell, even a single character, excel hesitates as it calculates for 5
to 10 seconds before it allows me to move on. The problem began when I
first tried linking a spreadhseet to others. I have since wiped my C
drive and reinstalled everything to no avail - the problem is still
there. Treid many things, one of the more obvious is to go into
options and disable calculations and links and so on, but when changes
are made to the options Excel does not seem to acknowledge it. When I
go into options again the check boxes I selected are back to the way
they were! It is quite maddening. The core problem is the slow re-
computation upon input. I have purchased the microsoft products and I
am not satisfied with them all because of this stupid problem. Makes
it hard to say nice things about microsoft products, as much as I'd
really like to. Mind you this spreadhseet worked fine before I tried
the linking and then it all went to hell.

This is a Macintosh Excel forum (thus the .mac in the title.) You'll get
much better answers posting to a windows forum.

 

[jbunce]

I am having the same issue and am frustrated. Mac says its windoes thus the comment above...windows says its a mac issue thus the response from the windows forum. Absolutely drives me crazy.

 

[Pat McMillan]

I'm confused about the problem you're seeing. If it's a Mac Excel 2008 issue
where there are big delays when typing in cells, please try going to
Excel/Preferences and disabling the following checkbox in the General pane:
"Show this number of recent documents:". Does that solve the problem you're
seeing? If so, we're working on a fix for this problem and hope to release
it soon. There's more info on this problem in this thread:
http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Excel/2681

Thanks,

Pat

 

[Dennis Ivy]

I am a long-time user of Excel. I just updated to office 2008. Now excel is so slow it is virtually useless. It takes about 3-5 minutes to opens my cash journa file. When open I can type a single number and then wait for 30 seconds up to several minutes before that number will appear and then I can input another single number. Aaaargh.
If I highlight a cell and then copy it, the delay is up to 5 minutes or more... and sometimes the program "unexpectedly quits."
And when I double click on the Excel icon in my dock to open it again, the program opens quickly but then it immediately tries to open the document that was open when the program quit. Arrrgh.
I read the advice I found here (disable the checkbox in Preferences/general "show this number of recent documents." The result was no significant improvement, if any.
This problem (galactic slowness) just before I got office 2008. So it may just be only that one document, and not the upgrade to 2008 that is the problem. In any event, that one document has over 300 lines and about 30 columns. About 12 columns have formulas all the way down.
I have used this same document for about 8 years as my cash journal. At the end of the year, I go in and delete the contents (not the formulas) and use it again for the new year. In the year 2008, this worked fine... until about mid September. Then it all got r r r r r r e e e e a a a a l l l l y y y y slow. Which is where we are now.
What have I done so far? I went in and told it (in preferences / calculations) to limit iterations to 2. No help.