Hi Stuart,

its hard to say without analysing the workbook but do you have:

- VBA event-driven code?
- large number of conditional formats?
- Hyperlinks?
- Linked pictures or shapes?
- excessively long dependency chains?
- zillions of files in %Temp%?
- large .xlb file?
- Addins loaded?
- Shared workbook?
- networked workbook?
- DDE feeds?

and finally its worth doublechecking that calculation mode is still set to
manual AFTER data entry or using the dropdowns.

regards
Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.3 now available
Name Manager 4.0 now available
www.DecisionModels.com

wrote in message
ps.com...
Hello Everyone

I am using Excel 2002 and the workbook concerned is 20MB in size. I
have set the calculation mode to manual to try to speed up data entry
but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Changing the data in a
data cell still takes too long. When I press enter after amending data
in a cell it can take 2 to 3 seconds before the cell below is selected.
For some reason selecting and deselecting cells which contain drop
down lists (the drop down lists were inserted using Data Validation
and the list is a named range on a hidden sheet) is even more painfully
slow (and that's without even changing the data in that cell). Can
someone kindly explain why data entry is so slow even when calc mode is
set to manual?

I would also be grateful to hear what spec of machine would be the best
for models of this size on Excel 2002. I am using a 2.80GHz Pentium 4
with 1GB of RAM (Its a Dell Optiplex GX620) and I understood that more
RAM wouldn't necessarily make a difference to the performance of this
model as it was reaching Excel's limits rather than my PC's limits. Am
I wrong?

Thanks in advance

Stuart