I used FastExcel on a sheet with which I had recalc tome problems.
It helped me spot the problem area in minutes and then it didn't take much
time (in my case!) to cure the problem.
Summing large ranges is generally very, very fast. A helper column and a
normal SUM are probably faster than SUMIF.
Your problem might be the VLOOKUP. You probably use FALSE as 4th argument.
This causes Excel to search the range from top to bottom. If you can sort
the data and omit the 4th argument, you may find a great reduction in
calculation time. But you'll have to check yourself that the value to be
searched was indeed the one found (to check for missing data)

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel

"Naz" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

I have a spreadsheet that I have been using for the year and now it is
time
to update it. The biggest problem with the old one was the re-calculate
time.
I have 2 worksheets in the workbook, 1 containing data and the other a
List
of employees (over 500). The List sheet picks up the pay of each staff
from
the data sheet every month. I used to use an array formula to do this then
used a conjoined sumif (Sumif(Range,PayRef&Month&Costcode,Sumrange) with
helper column as it was faster, but as the Data sheet gets bigger as the
years goes on the recalculate time is now at 12 secs.

Is there a faster alternative to Sumif?
Is there better method of summing large ranges of data (data sheet
contains
14000 rows)?
Has anyone used the product FastExcel (www.fastexcel.com) to optimise
there
spreadsheets and is it any good?

All help is greatly ppreciated

_______________________
Naz,
London