A quick general question regarding size of s'sheet

[RET79]

Hi.

One of my colleagues at work has this spreadsheet in place to work out an integral (I am not yet sure what he is integrating).

Anyway, he has ended up using 50,000 rows of one sheet to do this. What I suspect he has done is split the integral into small bits and added it all back up at the end to get the answer.

Now, personally, I think this method is bad. When he changes one of the inputs for this integral, the spreadsheet takes a few seconds to update all the 50,000 rows and 20 cols full of forumlas.

As a rule of thumb, could anyone confirm or deny my incling, which is that doing things in this manner on excel is sub optimal to say the least, and that he would be better off doing this task using some VBA instead of 50,000 * 20 cells just to integrate something.

(I am obsessed with speed this weekend which is why I am asking these questions)

RET79

 

[Jay Petrulis]

Hi,

One warning. It is not always possible to set the calc to manual. If the inputs are dependent on cells recalculating, then it is likely that a VBA routine *might* be faster. In general, though VBA is much slower that Excel' native function calcs.

Bye,
Jay

 

[RET79]

Jay,

I suspect that it DOES rely on worksheet formulas recalculating.

This is one reason I have been posting asking about if VBA is faster than worksheet functions you see...

RET79