You are working on what is a relatively small spreadsheet (couple of hundred rows, not many sheets), but you find that a sheet or sheets within the spreadsheet are extremely slow. A client recently experienced this and we tried a few things to speed it up (to see all reasons for slow spreadsheets look at the post on speeding up Excel spreadsheets)
Excel Sheet Slow- what are you not seeing?
We discovered (using GOTO Special- Objects) that on this one slow sheet, there were hundreds of ‘blank’ picture links.
If you are unaware of what a Picture Link is, it allows you to Copy and Paste as a Picture Link an area of the spreadsheet. Useful when building dashboards but it is processing heavy (especially on Apple Macs). Below a YouTube video explaining the issue.
If you paste as a picture, Excel just pastes a picture, but a picture link keeps monitoring the area you copied. Because of the way it is set up in the Paste Special dropdown, it is easy to accidentally choose the link rather than the picture. As shown below, the one on the left just pastes a picture, the one on the right pastes a linked picture.
Spotting the picture links
Sometimes you see something like the below. Note that there are the normal gridlines but there seem to be ‘shadows’ of gridlines.
You may find that your spreadsheet is struggling with multiple picture links (and on a apple mac it is crazy slow). To see if this is the case, on each sheet (unless you have a tool), click on HOME, then FIND & SELECT and then GOTO Special as shown below.
Then choose Objects and click OK
If you see Objects highlighted that you never knew existed then try deleting them. So below, even though this spreadsheet looks blank there are several objects on it, and this case they are picture links.
You should see an immediate improvement in speed of the slow Excel spreadsheet.
Once deleted, the sheet went back to normal speed!
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Related
Speed up a slow Excel spreadsheet (5 fixes for slow spreadsheets)