File saves slowly and crashes - when Excel file is too big?

[ellenya]

Hi!

I have Excel 2007 file that became very slow to save and crashes often. Description: the file calculates returns from 15 different funds. It has about 30 sheets. Where 1 sheet has about 30 graphs and histograms, 1 sheet calculates data through alias formulas and other sheets are just returns data (the biggest running 84 rows down and 45 columns wide. The entire file is about 2.8 MB in size.

Could you have any suggestions as to what can do to make it work normal? Are there any dowloads available? Should I break it up? It does not seem that it is too much information load? Your help is greatly appreciated.

 

[JazzSP8]

2.8MB doesn't seem that big an Excel file to me, I know I've got a lot bigger ones than that and they are stable enough.

Are you using a lot of volatile formulas to pull in your data? (http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecretsi.htm)

If your using to many and Excel is trying to recalculate them all when your saving then you might experience problems with it crashing, especially if your trying to do other things at the same time.

One thing you could try is to disable the 'Calculate before save' option and see how you get on from there, I'm not sure where the option is in Excel 2007 but in 2003 it's in the 'Tools > Options' menu under the 'Calculation' tab.

If you do find a lot of volatile functions then you might want to try copying and pasting some of the results as values if you have data that is going to remain consistent.

 

[bk]

What kind of formulas?

I've had files a few years ago that had VLookups and the sort that had extremely large lookup ranges and it made the files VERY slow.