Excel slow to open

Quasar

I use Excel extensively to produce my work reports - these are emailed to me as questionnaires already on Excel and I have to complete them and send them back.

However Excel has always been rather slow, and often documents take up to 30 seconds or more to open. This happens on both my lappies. It did when I had Norton and it does now that I got rid of it and have free software instead.

Is this a fundamental feature of Excel, or is there anything I can do to speed it up?

Thanks.

Stantheman

Just a thought, do the worksheets contain lots of info? The larger the sheets and the more you have oopen at a time will affect your speed.

johnmc

Remove any unneccesary formatting. That really slows things down.

Genghis

Do you notice other applications taking a long time to load or is it just Excel? What size are the spreadsheets you're trying to open?

Also, which version are you using? I'm using Excel 2002 on a fairly old laptop and it'll open a small spreadsheet within a few seconds, less than a second if Excel is already running.

You probably already do this but when possible, chose Close rather than Exit when switching between spreadsheets etc.. much of the overhead is loading the application into memory.

Quasar

No it is just Excel. And yes there is quite a bit of info on it and several pages reports, so maybe that's what it is.

It is not a major problem of course, as everything else works fast. I just wondered that's all. As has been said, it must be because the files can be fairly long - 10 to 20 pages typically. Oh well, I must learn to be patient.

Thanks everyone. :beer:

alanclarke

See http://martin.von-gagern.net/howtos/excel2007load - it works with my Excel 2007 and reduces load time dramatically. You do get a splash screen when Excel starts but it's a small price to pay.

In above article it only details changes for XLS, for Excel 2007 do the same for all Excel file types - XLSB, XLSX etc.