Excel 2016 frequently freezing, all add-ins are off

Copper Contributor

I'm using a large spreadsheet for work with many equations and no add-ins. Excel stops responding multiple times a day. I have 16 GB RAM, so that shouldn't be the issue. Usually it fixes itself within a minute or two, but there have been two times that I lost work. Are there any settings I could adjust to make it run more smoothly? I'm unsure about starting it in safe mode since that may disable required features.

 

Thanks!

5 Replies
Many questions arise:
How large is large?
How long does this model take to calculate?
Are there any sheets with many objects on them?
Any sheets where pressing control+End takes you to a very distant row and/or column?
Where is the file stored?
Is autosave on or off (and which setting do you need)?

It's 292,772 KB.

I'm not sure what you're asking about time to calculate or number of objects.

Originally the sheet had over 1,00,000 rows, but I've hidden all of the empty ones.

The file is saved on a company server.

Considering how often it freezes, I would like to keep autosave on so that it doesn't loose my work.

 

Thanks

Hello,

 

if it is on a company server, then it can only have Auto-Recover on, but not AutoSave, since that only exists for files stored in the cloud. 

 

Slowness and crashing can have many reasons.  Are you running 64 bit or 32 bit Office? If you run 32 bit, you won't be able to use all those 16 GB of memory, only up to 4 GB.  Even with all the memory available to Excel, it can easily be filled up during calculation and require more than available. 

 

Inefficient formulas can be a major issue. That's why the time to recalculate is important. When you hit F9, how long does it take to finish recalculating? If you want to get to the bottom of this you may need to use timer tools to find the bottlenecks. 

 

Check out the info on Charles Williams' site http://decisionmodels.com/optspeedb.htm

 

 

 

 

It's 64 bit. It's a new computer I'd gotten last week.

It took less than a second to finish re-calculating. I wonder if it's something going on with the server it's pulling from.

Thanks for the link. I'll look it over and see if I can apply it.

Try saving the file in xlsb format, it should at least make loading and saving quicker.

For the remainder: I agree with Ingeborg, start trouble-shooting your formulas. Look for functions like VLOOKUP, SUMIF(S), SUMPRODUCT, MATCH.

What is the calculation time if you hit Control+Shift+Alt+F9?