Calculate excel sheets in cloud- computer too slow

I have large excel files on a Lenovo t460 - size is around 200,000 KB. Calculating or saving the files take several minutes. This cannot continue. How do i move all my large calculations to a fast cloud based calculation environment. I am prepared to do so even if costs something. The process would have to be simple.
I heard amazon may be the solution, but i have no experience with that environment.
Any advice on how to solve my problem would be greatly appreciated.
JPF

Without having ANY idea what's in your 200MB workbooks, who can say with any specificity how you could improve a damn thing?

My advice: be prepared to spend upwards of US$20K on a consultant who'll cost you at least 3/4 of that asking you for specs. More advice: if you can't provide any details without expecting others to sign an NDA, you may have no way to escape my previous advice; flip side, details you COULD provide would allow others to offer USEFUL advice. Hint, hint.

Depending on what you're trying to do, there may be vastly superior software platforms. For example, if your workbook is essentially performing a huge Monte Carlo simulation with LOTS of lookups and sorting, GNU R or any other programmable statistics system would likely be one or two orders of magnitude faster.

Cryptic how?

I believe I was being blunt, rather harshly so.

From my perspective, OP hadn't provided ANY details beyond file size. As a general rule, Excel takes a while to open and save workbooks of 100MB or more disk size. OTOH, recalculation can be quite slow in modestly sized workbooks containing lots of intricate and/or volatile function calls, and it can take no time in huge workbooks containing only constants.

Great job focusing on my response rather than the OP's lack of details.

My previous advice referred to the preceding sentence.

Thanks. I will try and formulate my question in a more detailed fashion. But in essence, I have equations, lookup functions in the same workbook, and also one or two in another workbook, with very few links to another spreadsheet, no iterations, and no live updates of data. These are not complex functions, some "if " functions. It just takes a lot of time - several minutes - for the spreadsheet to load or recalculate. What I was hoping is to find some advice on how I could get these spreadsheets transferred to a cloud with all the calculations being done in the cloud and saved there. JPF

Originally Posted by excel4jp

. . . I have equations, lookup functions in the same workbook, and also one or two in another workbook, . . .

If those other workbooks are usually closed and, worse, on servers, that's one of the slowest things Excel formulas can do. Generally no way to speed that up unless you access the other workbooks as ODBC data sources, in which case you may be able to extract some efficiency from ODBC engines doing some of the work in parallel with Excel.

.. . . These are not complex functions, . . .

Lookup functions against large unsorted ranges can be quite slow without being complex.

Rule of thumb: if you have more than 1,000 formulas calling VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP or MATCH, you need to consider sorting those ranges to be able to use range lookups which use potentially much faster binary search.

. . . for the spreadsheet to load . . .

If your file size on disk is on the order of 200MB, it's always going to be slow to open and save. Huge files are lumbering dinosaurs, and the only way to speed them up is to make them smaller. If you can't make them smaller, you have to live with open/save slowness.

OTOH, recalculation speed up might be achievable. To repeat, using lookups into SORTED ranges is my 1st recommendation. 2nd would be checking for entire column (A:Z) or entire row (3:22) references and changing them to just the probable largest actual ranges you'd need to process. After that, eliminating excessive conditional formatting: example: currently each cell in X5:X1004 has the format condition formula =X5=MAX(X$5:X$1004) (this one for X5, the X5 in the formula would vary for other cells in X5:X1004); instead put =MAX(X5:X1004) in, say, DZ5, then change the format condition formula to =X5=$DZ$5 for X5; that is, calculate the MAX once rather than 1,000 times.

. . . how I could get these spreadsheets transferred to a cloud with all the calculations being done in the cloud and saved there

I've dome something like this with SharePoint. Do you have SharePoint? Note, however, that this sort of thing is FAR MORE DIFFICULT if you have to access other workbooks.

Originally Posted by excel4jp

Thanks. I will try and formulate my question in a more detailed fashion. But in essence, I have equations, lookup functions in the same workbook, and also one or two in another workbook, with very few links to another spreadsheet, no iterations, and no live updates of data. These are not complex functions, some "if " functions. It just takes a lot of time - several minutes - for the spreadsheet to load or recalculate. What I was hoping is to find some advice on how I could get these spreadsheets transferred to a cloud with all the calculations being done in the cloud and saved there. JPF

Sometimes the easiest solutions are the simplest.

While I haven't seen your workbook, I have many workbooks that have 10s of thousands of lines of data and sometimes it takes a minute to run a report.
Excel is a horrible database manager and though it has hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, it doesn't function well when you have a lot of information it has to sift through.
Often times we have to use the tools that we are given so I understand if it is the best tool we have or the company gives us.

So that said. Often times I turn off my auto-calculate and set it to manual. that way I can work without having to wait for the workbook to calculate after I add/update cell information.

Try setting the calculate to manual and then at the end right before saving, hit "calculate" at the bottom left of the screen and save.

Here is my recommendation for a direct solution since I've seen this question asked a few times on the internet and all the responses focus on speeding up the file and not what type of cloud services can help: you can go to places like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform and pay to use a virtual machine. They're just like real computers, but you pay by how long you use them for, and can delete them when you're done. You can choose a virtual computer with a lot of processing power - and offload the actual work to that computer. It won't speed up the calculation faster than it would on a single computer, but it will certainly be faster than your machine. If you're not a technical person, you can probably hire a contract developer for a few hundred dollars to help you set that up and get you connected. Hope that helps.