My place of employment has just upgraded to Win-XP and to Office XP. Along with the usual help calls you might expect from the user community, we have been getting calls from users who have large models that calculated fine in Excel 2000 but now calculate EXTREMELY slowly or just hang entirely. There are some common symptoms to these models: (a) they all (or mostly all) have at least one intentional circular reference; (
they mostly all contain external links; © many of these models contain data from outside data sources (such as FactSet and Thomson Financial); (d) many contain at least one data table (usually more).
I currently have a problem file in front of me that hangs when the user attempts to calculate (Calculation is set to Manual). The user states that this did not happen in Excel 2000. I’ve noticed that there are eleven data tables in the model, and the first 8 calculate rapidly, but when Excel begins calculating the ninth table it slows down to the point of stopping, which it does sometimes. This leads me to a question: can anyone tell me how to identify which table is which, according to Excel? What I mean is, when the user tries to calculate, Excel displays information in the status bar that Table 1 is calculating, Table 2, and so on. How can I find out what table Excel calls Table 1, Table 2, etc.? If I could identify each table by its Excel number, I might be able to get some more insight into the problem.
The other thing I’d like to know is if anyone else experiences this slowness in Excel XP and if there are any ways around it.
TIA,
