Long processing times

[Gary]

I have a HP Vectra VI (Pentium-4) PC with 256-K RAM running Windows
2000 and Microsoft Office 2000 Professional.

When I'm working on a large Excel 2000 worksheet, the run-time to
complete an action (like calculating; replacing; inserting rows or
columns; etc) gets progressively longer the more times I do the
action.

For example, the FIRST time, it completes almost immediately; the next
time, it many seconds; the next time, a few minutes; the next time,
several minutes; then many minutes; and, in some instances, an hour or
more. (The longest time has been over 3 hours).

It seems that Excel isn't freeing the resources after each action
completes.

Any suggestions?

Your help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Gary

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

256-K RAM
theres your problem. the IBM PC came with 64KB Ram, eventually getting up to
640KB RAM. Most machines today measure their RAM in MB rather then KB.

Just joking, I assume you mean 256-KB RAM.

Try turning calculation to manual (tools=>Options=>Calculate tab, choose
manual)

Then when you need the sheet calculated do Ctrl+Alt+F9

Perhaps this will help.

Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

 

[Dave Peterson]

256kb????

Maybe 256MB <vbg>

(I double checked my typing--just in case!)

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

I don't think that is what I am saying. Excel really needs to work with
essentially the whole used portion of the worksheet in memory all at once to
handle the dependencies in formulas and so forth (poetic license, but let's
say it is true) - so I am not sure what process has ended and isn't being
released. If you have large array formulas and so forth and a lot of
dependencies, then it is going to take time to calculate. This sounds like
what you are describing. The changes you describe generate a recalculation.
Excel is designed to be as fast as possible - but it is a general purpose
application, so it can not optimize for every possible usage.

Yep, 261,616KB comes out to be about 256 MB.

Regards,
Tom Ogilvy