Why is excel so slow all the time

[Davebert22il]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

I'm running excel 2008 on its own on a 2.2Ghz Macbook with 4Gb of RAM.
My spreadsheet is 14000x30 cells (although the problem occurs with 200 rows as well)
I have set it to manual recalculation.
I have one x-y chart of two columns of the data.

It takes about 10 seconds (with the associated beach ball) for every action. Whether that is a change to a number, a label, a column width. Every action is followed by the same wait.

The performance is awful. Is there anything that can be done short of abandoning 2008?

 

[Davebert22il]

I discovered one mechanism to speed things. I moved the chart to a separate sheet from the calculations.

Doing this makes the calculation page responsive in terms of edits. (with manual recalculation)

However the chart page remains agonizingly slow.

It seems the entire chart page is redrawn every time a change is made. For example when I edit the chart title on the formating palette (why is it on the format palette?) then the chart is redrawn for each character I enter. A redraw takes 10 seconds+ so I have a 10 second wait to admire the beachball after each key press as I enter the title.

Wouldn't it be faster to update once the entire title was entered, especially since I have Excel set to manual recalculate. I eventually gave up and edited the charts in Excel 2007 on Vista, which is much faster on the same machine.

This is insane! 10 seconds+ per key press. Its not that complicated a spreadsheet.