Excel running slow with many images.

**excelDWS** · 08-02-2010, 12:17 PM

I am using Excel 2002 on a pentium 4 (3GHz) and only 1 gig of RAM. I have a simple data base with names and pictures in cells that is sortable and used to do some simple lookups. There are very few calculations of any kind, mostly just about 500 pictures. It runs so slowly that any action (moving a picture, resizing, clicking in a cell, hitting delete on a cell, editing a cell, etc.) takes anywhere from 10-15 seconds depending on how recently I rebooted and how few programs are running. Is there any way to speed things up within Excel short of getting a faster computer?

**Whizbang** · 08-02-2010, 03:48 PM

Well, no one seems to be jumping at this.

As far as I know, there is nothing you can do to speed this up. Images, especially when you have 500 of them, will slow down your sheet. Try to reduce the number of images by using hyperlinks or something. Is there a reason you have all 500 images displayed all the time? It makes much more sense to me to display the image on user selection rather than by default.

Check out this thread for some nifty ways to dynamically display an image. AndyPope has a very impressive way to display an image via a chart, all without macros.

http://www.excelforum.com/excel-gene...down-link.html

**excelDWS** · 08-03-2010, 11:38 AM

Thank you for the reply and the link. I am looking at how some of those ideas work. How do hyperlinks work?

**Whizbang** · 08-03-2010, 11:43 AM

You have your images stored somewhere, usually in the same folder as the excel workbook or in a subfolder. Then you just add a hyperlink in the cell that points to the image. When the user clicks, it opens the image file.