Microsoft Excel 2007 constantly calculating sheets

Question

I believe this happening for two weeks now: Excel 2007 (on Windows XP) is acting funny on my computer; any medium sized sheet with some formulas in it takes a significant amount of time recalculating.

I can see this because the "calculating: 2 processors xx%" message was almost unseen before and now it appears on most operations like calculating a formula (on one cell), saving, previewing, etc.

If the sheet is complex (lots of formulas) I have to disable automatic calculations because excel renders as unusable - it hangs for a really long time, measureable in minutes.

Any idea on what may be causing this?

ps: this is a Core2 Duo computer with 2 Gb of RAM

Answer 1

It was something wrong with my profile. I deleted my old user profile and after that the computer got a bit more responsive...

Not a true "solution", but I sorted my issue this way.

Answer 2

There are many reasons why this could be happening, but there is one thing I have seen happen frequently. Do you have any external data sources referenced in the workbook?

Every time the workbook recalculates, it does them all. So, if the file is connected to external data which it can not find, it will keep trying to find it, thus increasing process time. Or if there are a lot of external references it can seriously slow down the process as it works it way through all of them.

Here is a good article addressing performance related to calculations.

MSDN article - Improving Performance in Excel 2007