Excel slow recalculations

[Ken Teague]

Please excuse my ignorance, here, as I am by no means an Excel expert. I
rarely use it, and when I do, it's for very basic things.

I have a customer who has a 15MB spreadsheet with multiple worksheets.
There are formulas in this spreadsheet which reference multiple smaller
spreadsheets, all less than 1MB in size, most are less than 500KB in size.
There are roughly about 10-15 smaller spreadsheets. In the main
spreadsheet, he modifies one of the formulas which directs it to open a
different set of (smaller) spreadsheets, collect data from them, then
perform recalculations based on the data that is collected from these other
external spreadsheets.

The customer claims he didn't have this problem at his previous job. He had
a similar laptop that he does now, but on his old laptop, he had 2GB RAM
whereas the laptop we provided him has 1GB RAM. After moving the files to
his local hard disk and redirecting these formulas to look for the files
there, Task Manager showed very low memory usage, however, Excel 2000 was
using 99% CPU while performing the recalculations. I upgraded him to Excel
XP and that seems to have solved the high CPU utilization issue and made
things slightly faster, but not substantially faster.

I don't believe this is a memory issue, since we don't see that in the Task
Manager. There was a CPU utilization issue until I upgraded him to Excel XP
(2002). It's not a network issue, since the files were moved to his local
hard disk. The only two things I can think of at this point are:

- Corrupted spreadsheet. One of my team members asked that I have him try
to copy/paste the spreadsheet in to a new spreadsheet. In my experience,
doing this copies the corrupt stuff, too, just as it does with corrupt Word
documents.

- Application issue?

- Formula issue? This seems like the culprit but, since I'm not an Excel
guru, I wouldn't even know where to start looking to fix something like
this.

I hope that I've provided enough information and used correct terminology
for you all to understand this delima. Please let me know if there's
anything else to provide. Since this is company financial data, I can not
provide a copy of the spreadsheet, but I may be able to provide the formula.
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

- Ken

[bgeier]

Do the number of rows and/or columns change?

If they do, there may be an issue with formulae trying to recalculate where no results would show (results would be either "0", " " (space) or null).

The idea of copying the spreadsheet to another might be a fix if all you copied were the formulae and data.
Do not copy the entire spreadsheet, only the areas that have data.