I am the assistant manager of IT for a company. We have a few users who have
been producing large excel files, filled with many, VERY long formulas and
complicated lookups/pivot tables, using these files as an active database.
There are currently 5 or 6 workbooks that are having this slowness issue, 3
are over 40mb. All other excel files run well, very well. His system has
been upgraded to a P4 3.6ghz HT with 2gb ram, all fast high end parts. The
page file in Windows XP has been modified to be an appropriate size in
relation to the ram. These files are used for inventory analysis,
management, and product growth/maintenance. These excel files are currently
our live inventory. When monitoring his system, excel never uses more
than12-15% CPU, and never more than 10-12%of his available ram, when
processing/updating these files, yet it runs extreemly slow.
My thought is that, although excel can physically accept more data, that
excel has pushed to the limit of what it process effeciently. My
recommendation is to migrate the files into MS Access which is designed to
accomodate large files being used as a database, while excel can do this, I
believe that access is better suited to the task.
Any thought on this, do any of you believe that I am correct in my
assumption? Are there any Microsoft personell who have input on this, or
developers who might have some insight?

Here is a link to everything you wanted to know about Excel performance
issues.

http://www.decisionmodels.com/index.htm

That being said if the files are 40Mb in size then I would be inclined to do
as you suggested and move them to Access. You can hook spreadsheets up to the
databases with queries and pivot tables and still get the functionality of
Excel with the performance of Access. For example pivot tables hooked up to
access tables get around the 65,536 row limit (good to up to 1,000,000
records depending on the number of fields and the size of the fields) but you
still get the ease of use of Excel and it's well understood interface.

--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"Dave B." wrote:

I am the assistant manager of IT for a company. We have a few users who have
been producing large excel files, filled with many, VERY long formulas and
complicated lookups/pivot tables, using these files as an active database.
There are currently 5 or 6 workbooks that are having this slowness issue, 3
are over 40mb. All other excel files run well, very well. His system has
been upgraded to a P4 3.6ghz HT with 2gb ram, all fast high end parts. The
page file in Windows XP has been modified to be an appropriate size in
relation to the ram. These files are used for inventory analysis,
management, and product growth/maintenance. These excel files are currently
our live inventory. When monitoring his system, excel never uses more
than12-15% CPU, and never more than 10-12%of his available ram, when
processing/updating these files, yet it runs extreemly slow.
My thought is that, although excel can physically accept more data, that
excel has pushed to the limit of what it process effeciently. My
recommendation is to migrate the files into MS Access which is designed to
accomodate large files being used as a database, while excel can do this, I
believe that access is better suited to the task.
Any thought on this, do any of you believe that I am correct in my
assumption? Are there any Microsoft personell who have input on this, or
developers who might have some insight?