At the company I work at we have a Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the purchases the company made in the last year. This sheet has aproximately 1500 rows and 30 columns.
A few days ago filtering in this sheet has started to become very slow. It takes around 5 seconds to filter any column for any keyword. Which is pretty long because this sheet gets filtered a lot and it gets annoying.
The sheet doesn't have any formulas or references to other sheets or files.
There are two macros running on cell changes, but disabling both macros doesn't make it any faster.
I also tried to delete every row except one, but applying the filter to the remaining row still takes 5 seconds to complete.
Does anyone have a idea of why this could be so slow?
Best Answer
This usually happens because Excel thinks the data set is much larger than it actually is. For instance, if someone had navigated to cell A1048576 and formatted it, even though it might not look different, now Excel thinks you have over a million rows. Test this by selecting cell A1 and then hitting CTRL + End. This will take you to what Excel believes is the last cell in the worksheet. If this is the issue you can delete all the rows and/or columns after where your actual data ends, save the file, close it, and reopen it. This should stop Excel from seeing all those empty cells as part of the data. If this doesn't work, selecting your data and pasting it into a new file should fix it.