# Excel 2007 - Slow working with large file



## walkersarahm (Sep 26, 2007)

Hi all,

I have a large excel file - 50,000 KB that i created in Excel XP (large number of columns and rows AND a whole slew of graphs). I know this is large, but It worked fine in XP. I could change numbers, move around, etc. unimpeded.

I just got new laptop with Vista and Office 2007. Now to move around in this file is very slow. to move from one cell to another takes a long time, to go down in rows is very slow, etc.

I have saved this to the new .xlsx format and this did not help things, and did not make the file smaller.

I have 2 GB of RAM which i thought would be plenty. Any ideas what is causing this slowness? i have tried exiting out of any underlying things (spayware, virus, etc) to see if this would help but it has not... should i buy more RAM?

any clue what the issue is here???? i am hoping it is some issue and not that Vista and office 2007 is just _slow_, which is my impression overall so far.

Thanks!!!!!


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## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

Hi there, welcome to the board!

Well, 50 MB is an extremely large file! There isn't going to be anything _fast_ about it. Office 2007 will probably be a little slower on such large files though. I'd work on getting that file size down, it's killing you. Would you like some help with that?


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## walkersarahm (Sep 26, 2007)

thanks for the response. i would love to make it a smaller file... if you have ideas that would be great!

each worksheet (the large file has 5 worksheets all about same) is 3220 lines long, and columns out to DW, and then has about 40 graphs.

actually, even if i just have one worksheet per file the file is ~7600 KB, and I still have the same problem. i guess its bc of all the graphs... b/c i have another file that is around the same size, but doesn't have so many graphs and it works fine. or do you think its something wierdo with that file? it works perfectly fine in XP and i saved it as a .xlsx file and that did not make the file size smaller as i thought it would.


THANKS!!! 

-s


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## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

The new file format won't do much for file size. Probably more if you saved as a binary type (xlsb). You should work on getting the files as small as possible. That means data structure analysis, formula performance evaluation, etc. The whole process is very large actually. I recommend sending the file(s) to somebody, although you may be looking at paying money for this type of service in lieu of the size. If you do want to go that route, which I recommend, I know some people who could help you out. Otherwise there are a lot of good resources to point you in the right direction.

HTH


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## spruce_goose (Sep 29, 2007)

I also work with very large XL data sets and when I saw this it got me a thinking, just how many MB is a raw dataset like this with no bells and whistles?

So I did a little experiment. I built a single tabbed worksheet with about the same amount of data that _walkersarahm_ has and saved it, just to see what the file size was. Just over 5 MB, no formatting, no graphs, just raw data. Each cell only containing a string of 8 characters on average. For those five sheets of _walkersarahm's_ data alone thats over 25MB!

A few things I do to get the file size down when working with really big sets:


Don't use any unnecessary formatting (no coloured cells, no underlining etc)
Clear all cells below and to the right of your data. Do this using the Edit>Clear>All. 
Use a database instead if possible

You might want to consider doing as _firefytr_ suggested, thats a lot of data your working with and Excel may not be the best way to be doing what your doing.


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## walkersarahm (Sep 26, 2007)

hi there,
thanks for the message.

can you suggest another program to use? b/c i need to make a whole bunch of graphs from this data and so access isn't appropriate.

guess its just frustrating since it works perfectly fine in XP... i guess all progress is not good (-:

-s


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## spruce_goose (Sep 29, 2007)

walkersarahm said:


> can you suggest another program to use? b/c i need to make a whole bunch of graphs from this data and so access isn't appropriate.


I was thinking dedicated business software.



walkersarahm said:


> guess its just frustrating since it works perfectly fine in XP...


I have avoided Vista and the 2007 flavours off office for this reason or maybe I am just afraid!


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## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

I'd recommend Access. You can push individual data to Excel to do calculations and show graph data if you'd like. This way you don't have the overhead in any one Excel file. Databases are faster for processing large amounts of information anyway. Access would be the logical choice.


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## WouterSimons (Oct 3, 2007)

If you use a database backend and then import the datasource in excel you can still use the data and have the speed of a database system backing you up. Perhaps that is something you could look into?

Personally I have always tried to avoid working with large datasets in excel. Just generating a view of your data in access and using that view in Excel is normally faster. Also the reports function in access can help a bit to create business reports. If you need more then some sort of business application may be worth investing in.


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