Excel 2003 Recalculate

[carlos_m]

Hello,
At a certain point of my work an Excel file has become impossible to use since every number I type in makes it go into recalculation of the entire spreadsheet which takes about 2-3 minutes.......the word Recalculate appears at the bottom LHS of the file, right beside the word Ready........tools>options>calculation is set to automatic since day 1......I don't know when the word recalculation appeared and I am not sure if it is the culprit........the file is 180MB in size.......lots of numbers but not so many formulas and functions.........Excel says that the number of different areas in a sheet that may have dependencies is limited to 65,536 but I don't know how to check if I've exceed that......the file has a total of 11 worksheets and they all provide information for the very first one.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
carlos_m

[Richard Buttrey]

Hi,

180 Mb seems a lot. Is this significantly more than the size when it was functioning as you expect.

The first thing to check is the last used row on every sheet. Use the {End} {Home} keys. If any of these show as row 65536 (assuming you are using Excel 2003) then it's possible that some of the formulae have been accidentally copied down to the bottom. Delete any rows that should clearly not be there.

[carlos_m]

Hi,
The file is about the same size as it's ever been.......a previous version shows 166MB......however, opening that old version which didn't have this Recalculation word at the bottom nor the slow 2-3 minutes recalculation time now it's suffering from the same illness........I can just assume that it's a setup feature that I may have accidently triggered and now I don't know how to get rid off.....another thing I observed is that if I open a brand new empty Excel sheet the Recalculation word is not there, but if I open a new worksheet from inside one of these big files the word Recalculation is there.
Cheers

[carlos_m]

Max Cell shows as 26129.
Cheers

[Richard Buttrey]

Max Cell shows as 26129.
Cheers

...and is that what you expect. i.e. are all 26129 rows valid?

The status bar which contains the word 'calculate' is at the application level. So if you open a virgin workbook you won't see it. But once it's appeared, and until it's cleared, i.e. when your rogue workbook completes its processing, it will remain.

[carlos_m]

Hi,
Yes, I have data in one of the worksheets up to that row......in other worsheets I have data up to 3 columns short of the last one IV.
I've tried shutting down the machine and restarting just in case some memory was being used up by some application but no cigar.
Cheers