Would splitting my table and then creating a relationship between the tables help or hurt?

[megera716]

I've posted about my table before and tried the suggestions I got but I'm still struggling with this laggy table. We sell a highly-customized product directly to the consumer and currently store this data in an Excel spreadsheet. My table has just under 3,000 rows but 105 columns .

About half of these columns are sales-related data, like sold-by location, customer name, date of sale, salesperson, sale amount, date they designed their product, date product was delivered, payments (and payment dates) and revenue when the sold product is delivered. The other half of the columns contain customer-specific data about the exact product they received. We've just added these columns on to the sales table because the sales table already has the name and all that good stuff but I worry the sheer size of it is what is making it so laggy.

If I were to split the table into two and keep the sales columns in one table and put the customer/product-specific data in another and then create a relationship between the two tables based on the customer name, would that possibly help the speed? Or would the legwork Excel has to do behind the scenes to keep the related tables related slow it down just as much if not more?

I also know that creating table relationships requires there to be a unique value. I planned for my unique value to be the customer name (first name last name). Believe it or not, there have been only a handful of duplicate customer names but the probability of more duplicate names will only grow as we do. So how would I handle that?

Thoughts?

 

[igold]

I would first like to see what you doing with your table that makes you say it is laggy. I use a 10,000 row by 21 column table daily that I add rows to everyday and slice and dice the info into pivot tables and queries, referenced by dozens of other sheets, and used in all sorts of VBA and there is nothing slow or laggy about it. It just works great.