Very slow autofilter processing

[William Loring]

I have a large file (about 8mb, 7,800+ rows, columns to "CO"). This file was
originated on a Windows machine, then is handed to a co-worker for
additional processing. Lately, the file has become VERY cumbersome to work
with, in particular when using the AutoFilter commands. Filtering a single
column may take 10+ minutes on a 1GHZ Dual G4, where it will take a matter
of seconds on a much slower P3.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

I've tried "Save as" from the PC to generate a new file, and have also tried
cutting and pasting the entire spreadsheet, to see if we could somehow
eliminate whatever corruption might have entered into the sheet. It hasn't
worked so far.

This has been tried on a 1GHZ Dual G4 running OS 9.2.2 and Office 2001, and
on a 500mhz G4 running OS 10.2.8 and Office X.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Regards,

William Loring

The Tire Rack, Marketing dept.
7101 Vorden Parkway
South Bend, IN 46628

574-287-2345 x225
574-236-7714 fax
888-362-8473 sales
www.tirerack.com

 

[William Loring]

I appear to have isolated my problem. I copied the spreadsheet one column at
a time into a new document, testing the autofilter function each time. I
narrowed the problem down to two columns. In one of the columns, I found
that some of the cells had comments attached to them. The comment window was
extraordinarily large, although there was only one line of text in the
comment.

I copied and pasted the entire column into a text editor (BBEdit), and then
back into Excel, so I got the data, but removed the comments. The autofilter
function now works properly.

Does anyone know of any particular Windows/Mac incompatibilities with
comments?

Thanks for your help.

William Loring
www.tirerack.com

 

[J.E. McGimpsey]

I appear to have isolated my problem. I copied the spreadsheet one column at
a time into a new document, testing the autofilter function each time. I
narrowed the problem down to two columns. In one of the columns, I found
that some of the cells had comments attached to them. The comment window was
extraordinarily large, although there was only one line of text in the
comment.

I copied and pasted the entire column into a text editor (BBEdit), and then
back into Excel, so I got the data, but removed the comments. The autofilter
function now works properly.

Does anyone know of any particular Windows/Mac incompatibilities with
comments?

Thanks for your post - I've never seen that kind of slowdown before.
AFAIK, there aren't any Win/Mac incompatibilities wrt comments -
this seems like poor code. Could you please make sure you send your
feedback to MS using the Help/Feedback on Excel menu item?