Excel going slow

[IDS]

Has anybody else had problems with Excel recalculating very slowly recently?

For the last few days I have had the following problems intermittently:
- Some spreadsheets that normally open quickly locking up for minutes when first opened.
- Slow recalculation (several seconds) when data is entered in auto recalc mode, making the spreadsheet almost unusable.

In the second case, switching to manual recalc, then back to auto seems to fix it.

The spreadsheets with problems all have multiple VBA user defined functions returning arrays, and with the lock up on opening the recalc message at bottom left says something about re-sizing dynamic arrays, so this is probably associated with the new dynamic array feature.

I'm running the subscription Office, so I get auto-updates, but I don't get the previews of new features that haven't been officially released.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[pmover]

not me and i use a single license (not subscription based) version on iMac.

 

[Agent666]

I had a similar issue a week or two ago, adding a certain UDF on the sheet caused everything to lag. Seemed related to dynamic arrays, if I double clicked into a formula that returned an array it would take ages to calculate with the re-sizing message you noted. The sheet in question had a lot of VBA UDF's returning arrays

After opening and saving on another computer it magically went away and have not had an issue since. So who knows, just another of Excels funny little things......

https://engineervsheep.com

 

[dold]

We had big problems with a lot of our VBA-heavy spreadsheets when IT started switching everyone to x64 office a couple months ago.
But ya'lls issues sound different than what we were running into.

 

[IDS]

Update. Recalc had been OK for a couple of weeks, but I have just spent 20 minutes opening a spreadsheet that normally opens in a few seconds. Switching to manual recalc then back to auto seems to have fixed the problem for now.

Doing an Internet search the only thing I found more recent than 2018 was a link to this thread.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[GregLocock]

This year we had an update that has made Excel freezy and slow. Whether that is down to our IT group or Microsoft, nobody knows.


Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[dold]

I've noticed moving cells via drag and drop can be extremely slow if autocalc is on. At least on one workbook in particular. Granted, it does have ~6,000 named ranges...for some reason. Strange that it bogs down when auto recalcing but not when manual calcing. Drag/drop a cell with autocalc on and i'll wait ~15 sec. Drag/drop a cell with it off and it's instant, and hitting recalc take maybe one sec after the drag/drop.

I also see huge variations in runtimes on some of my bigger VBA operations. Sometimes the code will run in ~30 sec, hit run again with everything in an identical state and it might take ~180 sec. Even when the only program open is excel.

But in general, yeah, excel is slower/hangs up more now that it has in the past. I'm on 365 subscription (personal FWIW).

And when working on files on onedrive I ALWAYS get the "we ran into a problem with autosave....etc" banner. Quite annoying. But autosave is quite nice (sometimes).

 

[Agent666]

Some vba code does scale in terms of time taken to execute depending on how many spreadsheets you have open with vba in them.

My guess is if you have 5 open it allocates a fixed 20% resources for example instead of dynamically being able to locate 100% of the resources to the active workbook.

You can show this quite easily if you have some vba intensive workbooks, time some code, open copies, time again and so forth.

The only way I've found around it is to open excel Workbooks specifically as unique instances.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/force-excel-to-open-new-instance

The has its drawbacks for me as it opens any Addins as read only after the first.

https://engineervsheep.com