Good morning,
Can anyone tell me why my Excel would lock up frequently, unusually when we are saving. It's not just my Excel, it the entire customer service group. I don't know if it's because our files are too big? We are using Excel 2016 on the Cloud 365. We have the latest updates completed. Our company has a good antivirus protection.
We have cleaned up many of the conditional formats and formula Name manager. Some of our spreadsheets have 30 plus tabs, with 1000 or more lines of data in about 15 of the tabs. Are these too big for this application?
Anything else I can look at to help these issues?
Thanks so much
Amy
From my own experience: it should work nice and fine but it doesn't always. I think and hope that lot's of people who use Cloud services work perfect with it, but I always encountered some strange behaviour in working places where this transition from own files on own network to Cloud was used.
Don't know why or how, only see that it is.
Of course everybody involved in this development can tell you there is 'no problem' and it will work fine. But you experience yourself that ain't true.
Until these strange problems are solved (and of course that will be in some time or some years, I think they work on it) be aware that there are this kind of problems. Set your settings to 'save frequently' and where possible work on your own computer and save the file also there to be sure you have a decent version.
that's my advice, also learned by the hard way of losing data and have to rebuild again
Cloud 365 refers to Office 365, I think the files are used on desktop Excel, not in Excel Online, let me know if i'm wrong.
Which is the file size?
If you have the Proffesional Plus version of office, you can use the workbook optimization tools from the Inquire tab: Turn-on-the-Inquire-add-in
If the file size is unusually big, excesive formatting is one of the causes (for example, if you have 1000 rows, but you format entire columns)
To identify the largest sheets, you have to open the excel file with an archiver like winrar, winzip, 7z (right click the file-Open With-choose the archiver. Make sure you don't change the program associations, open with archiver only for this time)
Navigate into the excel archive to xl folder, then to worksheets folder. You will see there a list of xml files named like shee1.xml, sheet2.xml and so on.
There should be the sheet size info in that window, you should easily see which one is unusually large.
Another reason for excel to hang up is excessive use of array formulas, or SUMPRODUCT formulas (native array function). If this is the case, you have to optimize them, or (better), to redesign the application: splitting data into multiple sheets is not a good way to go. (unless they don't have the same data structure)
My two cents; it's not clear if the files are being saved to SharePoint or OneDrive/OneDrive for business. I know when I save files to OneDrive even a 5MB file can lock Excel and take quite a while to save in comparison to saving to a local drive.
Internet upload speeds are no where near as fast as download speeds.
Mynda
