Excel 2007, Win7, long hangs

[garyfritz]

I have a reasonably large spreadsheet: 3 tabs, all with about 4000 rows of about 20 columns. One of the colums does a VLOOKUP in a 6x28 table and uses that to calculate some values that I chart.

I built this spreadsheet on a laptop with Vista Home Premium. Anytime I made any changes it took about 5 sec or so to recalculate the spreadsheet, so I turned off auto calculation. It was cumbersome but it worked.

Now I've moved to a new laptop with about a 2x faster processor, 6GB of RAM, and Windows 7. When I make changes, it updates the spreadsheet very quickly -- less than a second. Great!

Except: after the spreadsheet has been open for a little while, it gets in a state where doing almost ANYthing -- making any changes, selecting a plot on the chart, even I think just ALT-TABbing to the spreadsheet (expose event?) locks up Excel for about 80-90 seconds. There is no disk activity to speak of but the CPU (4 cores) is 25% busy. Excel is fully burning up one core.

So far the only workaround I've found is to switch to the spreadsheet, wait 90 sec for it to unhang, and exit Excel. When I start up Excel again it works fine for a little while, then it starts up again.

Any idea what could cause this? It's darn near unusable.

Thanks!
Gary

 

[garyfritz]

I have duplicated this behavior with a much smaller and simpler spreadsheet -- 15x1000 cells of data, very simple formulas, and a 5-line chart. I think the chart is the common element. If I click on any plot in the chart (I want to format them), the spreadsheet locks up for about 30 seconds. Once I'm able to request a "Format Series" operation, the format dialog sometimes never apperas, or it appears and immediately vanishes, or it appears, stays locked up for a while, then vanishes. Sometimes it disappears and is replaced by a "Format Shape" dialog. I've been fighting this for 30 minutes and I still haven't managed to format my chart.

Help!!! I can't use Excel like this!!

 

[garyfritz]

Come on, somebody. I can't go back to Vista, but I can't use Excel if it locks up on me every time I look at it.

No suggestions? No ideas? Does anybody else see this on Win7 with Excel 2007??

 

[garyfritz]

OK, I ran Windows Update many times when setting up the laptop, but for some reason it missed some Office updates. I updated Excel to a more recent version than on the old laptop, and now it seems OK. Go figger.