I produce price lists on my Mac Powerbook 10.4.2 on MS Excel 10.1.0.
Some of the 5 page price lists have lately become so slow they are
impossible to work on. The largest is 220 k and most are 180 k. On my
previous Mac Powerbook it did not happen. What is going on and how can
I make them work normally? Could it be an MS trick to get me to
upgrade to a later version of Excel?

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Request for Question Clarification by hummer-ga on 03 Dec 2005 17:42 PST

Hi janiceashby,

There are some excellent tips at the following link -

Speeding Up Opening and Saving a Workbook
"You should also press Ctrl+End in your workbook to see where Excel takes you..."
"You can also do a "Save As" to save your workbook to a new file..."
http://exceltips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T1038_Speeding_Up_Opening_and_Saving_a_Workbook.html

Please let us know if that helps,
hummer

What kind of Powerbook is it?  I regularly work with 4MB+ Excel files
on my G4 1.25ghz Powerbook with 1GB of RAM.  The response time isn't
what I would call "snappy", but there's no real lag.  Slow system
performance can be a result of not having enough RAM to handle 10.4.2

Microsoft documents often contain macro viruses that will make your
entire system slow.  Sweep your machine for viruses and malware.

Excel will sometimes slow down if you have many cells with very
complex formulas in them.  I would expect your file size to be higher
if this was the case.  But if you  replace all your formulas with
values and your speed increases, this may be the problem.

I don't know what the latest patch # for your version of Excel is, but
make sure you have it installed. Go to the Microsoft Mac downloads
section to make sure you have the latest.  IMO, there is no pressing
need to purchase version 11 of Office unless you have a need for the
"Project Center", which gives you a central place to manage projects
that use multiple Office apps.

Hope it helps.

I've had weird slowdowns and other problems with Excel on my PC. What
I've done after not figuring out how to fix it, was to copy/paste all
the data into a new file, reformat the columns and rows. Try it...