Excessive memory use

[mlints]

I have a problem running Excel 2007 on a laptop with Windows Vista.
Any time I work with a file of any substantial size, the program
repeatedly freezes up. Windows Task Manager shows that Excel is
using all the available CPU, even though I'm not performing any
tasks. This may go on for 2-3 minutes or more, then I have a few
seconds to try and do some work in the file before it freezes up again
for another 2-3 minutes. This is extremely aggravating - I'm spending
hours doing what should take minutes!

The file I'm working on has about 15 sheets of 10,000 records each
with about 25 columns per record. The file size is about 40 MB, but
Task Manager reports that Excel is using around 400 MB of memory.

Can anyone tell me why Excel is using so much memory, and more
importantly, how I can prevent it from repeatedly interrupting my work
while it seemingly performs some task(s) in the background that uses
all the CPU?

 

[Mr. K]

Alain,

I have the same problem. I working with a lot of data and Excel
sometimes freezes. I was saving in .xls format for sharing the file
with old excel version (2003). I saved it as .xlsx and it seems that
the problem was minimized.

I also tried to clen temporary files that could be dealying Excel
performance.

Do you have a worksheet with many custom formats? Maybe formating all
collums (now with 1 million lines) can be reducing the performance
too.

I installed Excel 2007 in my computer and made a comparison with Excel
2003. Performance was drastically reduced in 2007 after performing
intensive calculation in a Monte Carlo simulation (up to 3x)

Anyway, I am happy with 2007 for data manipulation of huge data.

 

[mlints]

I finally resolved the problem. It was caused by a couple of add-ins
to Excel that I was using, Rick Sover and Premium Solver by Frontline
Systems. The add-ins are great for soving difficult systems of
equations, but they were slowing down normal use of the program with
large files. After inactivating these add-ins, Excel now runs
normally.