Background Calculation acts as though it's disabled
 

Win XP, SP4
Excel 2002, SP3

Background calculation initially worked fine, but then at some point of
time, it quit working all together and went back to how Excel 97 and Excel
2002 calculates. I like to know what changed and how to correct this issue.

What sort of setting is put in place when Excel no longer does the
background setting using automatic calculation mode?

Background calculation within Excel should allow you to interrupt it's
calculations and perform other actions, rather than having to wait it out
like in prior versions for every one action taken within Excel.

Example: With Excel 97 or Excel 2000, if you were to type in 100 rows of
data within 1 particular column, just going straight down the sheet that you
have in your hand, and it took Excel 3 full seconds to recalculate, but yet,
it only takes the you 500 milliseconds to put in data into a single cell on
the average, with Excel 97/2000, this would take a little longer than 5 full
minutes while under Excel 2002, this should only take about 55 seconds to
do, provided this feature is working properly.

While this issue never really bothered me too much at work, though also
found it to not work at home, and hated that fact at home given the
financial files would require some time to recalculate fully.

Now I had to deal with a spreadsheet that I created for my boss, it works
fine except it goes into constant recalculation mode when retrieving data,
which I had to setup VBA code to take his calculation mode setting into
account, set it to manual prior to attempting to refresh the data, then put
it back to his calculation mode afterwards, if it's not manual. If his
setting was manual prior to the VBA intervening, then it would recalculate
the worksheet, and not bother with the calculation mode setting.

--

Sincerely,

Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.
Master MOUS 2000