I know there are some Excel wizards here on the board, so maybe they know an answer to this question.

I have to work with a pretty big Excel sheet on my laptop. This laptop is a HP Spectre X360 laptop, 2018 model with i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Pretty good specs I would think.

Now, when I change the value of a cell in this particular Excel sheet, this doesn't always happen instantly. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for it to change. Same with changing the color of the cell. This is annoying.

What could be causing this? I already changed the energy settings to maximum speed when running on cable, so I don't think that is the problem. I also get the impression it worsens when I've been working for a while, and is better when I reboot the PC, making me think it's some kind of buffer that is getting filled up.

I'm stumped. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I don't know the answer to this, but I know enough about excel to know that it might not have anything to do with your computer's specifications.

I know that Excel has a bunch of heuristics to determine where/when it decides to recalculate a given cell's value, and that the recalculation itself might be slow if the spreadsheet is complicated, for instance if there are a lot of references in the chain of calculation.

Perhaps start here and see if anything rings a bell:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/excel/excel-recalculation

If you have a lot of conditional formatting, particularly if the formatting is on cells whose values change based on changes to other cells, this can affect recalculation times.

tanstaafl.

Thanks for the response guys. So I guess it's not all that uncommon at all?

Something I have noticed since my first post that might be important : it's indeed a pretty big excel sheet, but when my colleague uses it on his Macbook, this kind of delay doesn't happen. Could it be that Mac is more optimized than my PC for stuff like this?

I believe that the mac and PC versions of excel contain significant differences in their base code and the way they work. I think the differences are more than just "optimization", they may have basic functional differences which mean that recalculation is handled entirely differently.

It also may be a question of configuration settings. Perhaps your installation of excel has something that is configured differently than the default. Can you check the sheet on someone else's Windows machine?

Another question: Is there any chance that the worksheet is referencing any external files, particularly if those files are on a network drive? Or are you opening the file directly from a network drive? Maybe the recalc slowness is a network access issue.

Launch task manager and see what's burning up the cpu. It probably isn't Excel.