New spreadsheet takes a long time to open and often gets stuck

QuestionEdit

My computer is Windows XP. For the last few years I have kept our holiday bookings records on excel, but a couple of days ago decided I could useto work out the VAT for me instead of my getting in a panic every quarter. I have copied the 2010 part of the sheet onto a new sheet and put formulas into several of the columns, and so that I don't have to keep copying the formula I have copied them onto the whole columns, which seem to go on to infinity. Is this why the sheet is is taking up to 10 minutes to come up when I start it? Should I delete the formulas and then put them back for say 100 rows? When I saved the new sheet it went into my documents, but I wanted it on the desktop and I think I 'copied' onto the desktop, will that have caused a problem - do I have 2 sheets running simultaneously? When it gets stuck I press ctrl alt & delete and the task manager shows 2 entries - one at the top of the list and another at the bottom of the list, although while it was running just now there was only one entry. I now have 'Cwmiar Bookings 2010' and 'shortcut to Cwmiar bookings 2010' on the desktop - if I delete one will I lose the programme altogether?

AnswerEdit

A shortcut is a shortcut, so deleting this shouldn't delete the file. If you have a LOT of formulas, you have a lot of calculation, so you MIGHT find that is the reason it's slow - I'd certainly go with future proofing, but extending the formula for (say) 400 rows should future proof it enough - inprethere are 65536 rows, and in Excel 2007 it goes up a couple of binary levels so even more - I'm happy to take a look at the file if that might help - I can suggest other ways of streamlining it - my email is aidan.heritage@virgin.net