Slow Moving Spreadsheet (Excel 2003)

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I have a relatively small spreadsheet that contains no formulas. It is so slow it is excrutiating. Not only inserting/deleting columns and rows, but just generally entering data in a cell.
Any ideas on what is wrong and what I can do?

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Does it help if you
– Create a new workbook.
– Open the ‘slow’ workbook.
– Select the used range of the first worksheet.
– Copy it to the clipboard, then paste it into the first worksheet of the new workbook.
– Repeat for the other worksheets (if any).
– Use the new workbook instead of the old one.

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Hi Diane:

If I have a workbook behaving in the way you describe – for no apparent reason! – I first save it as a web page and close the file, then open the .htm file (in Excel) and resave it as an Excel file.

More often than not this resolves the problem.

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I agree with Tony, you might want to resave your file and check what format it is in.

I’ve had similar problems when a spreadsheet is in web page format. There is one dataset I need to download from the net and even though I save is as Excel and it has the .xls extension the file is in web page format. I need to re-save as excel format. If you do pivot tables on a spreadsheet in web page format, it creates all kinds of sub folders in your directory and it is very difficult to go back in several days and alter the pivot tables. The entire thing is very slow.

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