Calculating: (2 processor(s)):x% message

[BrendaW]

Hi

I am using Excel 2010 and Windows 7. Whenever I try to open this particular workbook, opening the file is delayed and the message above pops up in the grey toolbar in the bottom right hand of the screen. If I click anywhere in the white workbook space, the 'processing' stops and the file opens. As soon as I try to do anything in the file (eg add a new row of data), the processing message appears again and the file temporarily freezes. Clicking somewhere in the file while the processing message is displayed usually ends the freeze so the file can be edited (but not always, and I can't figure out the difference between when this works and doesn't work).

The file is small (374kb) and simple - I am not a very sophisticated Excel user! There are 10 active sheets and 9 have calculations of some sort - generally SUMIFS and COUNTIFS formulas - which are based on data entered into 1 sheet. The data entry sheet has 1638 rows x 10 columns.

The workbook is used daily and the processing message is relatively new. It is most noticeable / prolonged when a new date is entered in the date column (Column A) of the data entry sheet. It used to be possbile to navigate to Column B by simply using the right arrow on the keyboard, but since the message started appearing, we now have to click to move (or wait for the processing to stop, which is very slow).

The file is stored in a Dropbox folder and accessed by 2 users regularly (not sure if this is at all relevant). The second user has Excel 2007 and Windows Xp.

Any advice as to how I eliminate the processing message as it is really affecting the performance and usability of the file?

Thanks very much

 

[BrendaW]

I would really appreciate that if you have time. Will you PM me your email address?

Thanks so much.

 

[RoryA]

Done.

 

[RoryA]

I haven't seen anything immediately obvious other than the fact that you have hundreds of SUMIF/SUMIFS/COUNTIF formulas that refer to entire columns. Have you thought about using pivot tables instead to produce your summary data? They would be a lot more efficient.

 

[BrendaW]

That's a good observation. I guess the main answer is that I just don't find pivot tables all that useful when you want to use the data in them in further calculations, so I default to creating the formulas from scratch to get the results that pivot table would give me much more easily. Clearly I need to devote some time to learning more about pivot tables AND how to work with dates more effectively (my lack of knowledge here is really what has got me into trouble in the first place) - finding that time is the challenge though! i'm going to have to build next year's file soon though - let's hope that's good enough incentive!