It sounds to me like Excel is making frequent use of virtual memory.
If stopping unneeded software from running at the same time as Excel
doesn't solve the problem (see iliace's post), more RAM is probably
the best idea.

I upgraded RAM on a friend's WinXP machine from 256 MB to 768 MB. It
was abominably slow before the change; my friend is still amazed at
the speed at which his PC works, six months afterward. My own XP
machine was upgraded to 1 GB from 512 MB and it's much snappier now.

Mark Lincoln


On Dec 6, 2:31 pm, sstexas wrote:
I'm having trouble with a spreadsheet that has 32,000 rows and 120 columns
(Excel takes forever to do anything, I get frequent "low memory" warnings,
etc). I'm currently using Excel 2003. I cannot break this spreadsheet into
pieces - it has to be combined in one sheet.

Is there a way to get around this problem? Should I upgrade to Excel 2007?
Can I purchase special software?

I've looked online, and it doesn't appear as though there's a fix for this,
but I figured you guys might have an answer.