Recently we discovered a way that seems to trick Excel into performing some tasks quicker. So if you experience a slow Spell Check, GoalSeek and Find/ Replace in Excel try this option to make it go faster.
Table of contents
YouTube for Slow Spell Check, GoalSeek and Find/ Replace in Excel
Slow Spell Check
For some reason, with some spreadsheets, Excel seems to need a lot of time to find the next word searched for when doing a spell check. However, if you (don’t laugh) wiggle your mouse outside the Spell Check dialogue box, it seems to speed up. As shown below once you click one of the options, wiggle your mouse outside the area and suddenly the spell check speeds up. You can see it working in the YouTube video at the end of this post.
We think it has something to do with the screen, in a similar way that your default printer setting has been shown to slow down Excel (tip- make your default printer an onboard printer e.g. save to pdf and NOT a wifi based external printer).
Goalseek slow to calculate
When you Goalseek, in some spreadsheets, Excel seems to take a long time to go from 1 iteration to the next, so the goalseeking appears extremely slow or appears to have frozen. However, when you wiggle the mouse outside the area, it immediately speeds up.
So below if we do this goalseek and click OK and stay still (no mouse movements), the interactions are either very slow or seems to have stalled (watch the video clip below to see the goalseek seemingly in wait mode)
If we do the same thing, but after clicking OK we move our mouse around, outside the dialogue box area, suddenly it starts iterating and comes to an answer (see YouTube clip below to see what we mean).
Not sure why but a bit of extra speed always helps.
Slow Find/ Replace when moving to next
A similar issue is sometimes found with Find/ Replace. If you click Find Next or Replace Next it is almost as if Excel is not moving. When you move your mouse around outside of the Find/ Replace dialogue box, it immediately speeds up.
Related
Speed up a slow Excel spreadsheet
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