why does it say not responding

[genyjoL]

Excel seems to almost freeze up and a blue circle is rotating. Up at top of
screen it says "not responding". why is this happening? This is brand new
laptop so memory is not an issue.

 

[JLatham]

The system checks applications every now and then to see if they're locked up
or not. If an application is truly locked up or is working so hard that it
ignores the "are you awake?" system inquiry, the message appears. So what it
is telling you is that Excel is working hard to get the job done and is
ignoring the system inquiry ... or Excel has gone off to la-la land...

I see this more with Excel 2007 than in earlier versions.

 

[JLatham]

Oh, I should add that I see it even on a system with an i7 975 running at
3.33GHz with 12GB of RAM installed. So, you're right that this is probably
not a RAM issue, but rather it's a CPU activity and interrupt processing
issue.