MS Office 2003

[SawThe Light]

My wife uses Office 2003 in our home office and is she's complaining that some Excel files have suddenly become really slow to open. (For slow, read 50 seconds+) The slow file is a simple spread sheet of 600 bytes. Her computer has a 1.3 Gb Celeron running XP Home with 512 Mb RAM and a 20 Gb HD with 60% free. This problem appeared once before around 4 - 5 months back and I think I might have accidentally fixed it by simply saving a copy to the back-up drive and saving it as an Office 97 worksheet, then when re-opening it in 2003 it was back to normal. This time the slow file won't respond to anything.

I can't seem to see any answers in the MS help system so I am generously throwing up the problem to the PPruNe gurus.

Anyone got any ideas? Sure would appreciate some.


STL

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

SawThe Light,

It sounds like that file might be corrupted. Try opening the same file from one of your backups and updating the data if you have one.

Take Care,

Richard

[Agent86]

Saw the Light,

Is it ALL excel files that are slow to load or just one specific file?

If all file load are slow it could be similar to a problem I had.

Outlook has a journal system that tracks among other things when and what Office files are opened. This is set by to default to ON and tracks these events even if you have never opened or used Outlook.
If you do not use Outlook the temp journal file slowly gets bigger and bigger waiting for you to open Outlook. This adds a huge lag to the opening of files.

The fix (aside from uninstalling Outlook )

Open Outlook, Tools Menu, Options, Journal Options
deselect the tracking of the Office files.

Or open Outlook regularly.

This problem was particularly bad with Outlook '97 and the build of the journal file when Outlook was opened (to remove the tracking) was around 5 minutes.

HTH

Max

[Keef]

I had that problem a while ago with one file. Presumably corrupted.

The "save as older version of Excel" fixed it for me, but the next plan was to save as a TEXT file, then open a new Excel spreadsheet and import the data. Don't know if that would have worked.

You don't have a network, with one of the networked machines absent but "shared" by the one you're working on, do you?

[SawThe Light]

Thanks to Richard, Max and Keef.

Tried all those tips but to no avail. Have saved the file as Excel 95 and it works fine again except that it doesn't support all Mrs STL's comment boxes. No problem though as the program asks if you want to open them, and if you agree they reappear. It is simply a matter of saving as 95 on shutdown again. Bloody computers!!!

Thanks again


STL