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Fix Excel Freezing or Slow

Fix Excel Freezing or Slow

By Mitch Bartlett 44 Comments

Microsoft Excel is a powerful program. So powerful, that it’s probably the most susceptible to have problems. I have troubleshot problems with Excel freezing and saying “Not Responding” in Windows. The reasons this happen can vary greatly. Here are the most common ways to fix the problem.

First, check to see if Excel is freezing in more than one spreadsheet. If Excel freezes in any file you open, it is likely related to the program itself. If it only happens in one file, you will have to pinpoint what exactly is causing the problem in that file.

Excel Freezes Every Time Used

If Excel freezes in every file. Try these steps.

Start Excel in Safe Mode

  1. Close completely out of Excel.
  2. Hold the Windows Key and press “R” to bring up the Run dialog box.
  3. Type excel -safe then press “Enter“.
    If Excel opens with the above steps, it is likely that a plugin or other software is installed that is interfering with the software. Proceed with step 4 to try to fix the issue. If you still experience problems with Excel started in Safe Mode, try the next set of instructions.
  4. Select “File” > “Options“.
  5. Select “Add-ins“.
  6. Select “Excel Add-ins” in the “Manage” drop-down menu, then select “Go…“.
  7. If any items are checked, try unchecking them, then selecting “OK“. This will disable Add-ins that may be causing the freezing.
  8. Close Excel, then launch it normally to see if that did the trick. If not, repeat steps 3 through 7, only try a different selection in step 6. Go through the list in the drop-down for “COM Add-ins“, “Actions“, and “XML Expansion Packs” and see if disabling items in those selections do the trick.

Reinstall Office

  1. Right-click the “Start” button, then select “Control Panel“.
  2. Select “Programs“.
  3. Select “Uninstall a program“.
  4. Locate “Microsoft Office” in the list. Right-click it, then choose “Change“.
  5. Select “Quick Repair“, then click “Repair“.
  6. Once the repair is complete. Try to launch Excel and see if you have a freezing problem. If the problem persists, try the “Online Repair” option.

Excel Freezes in Only One Spreadsheet

If the problem only occurs when only one spreadsheet file is open, there is something in the file causing the problem. Give these steps a try.

Clear Conditional Formatting

  1. While you have the problematic file open in Excel, select “Home” > “Conditional Formatting” > “Clear Rules” > “Clear Rules From Entire Sheet“.
  2. Select any additional tabs at the bottom of the sheet, and repeat step 1 on each of them.
  3. Select “File” > “Save as” and make a new copy of the spreadsheet with a different name. The old one will exist if you need to revert to it due to lost data.

If you no longer experience freezing or slowness problems in the file, you will need to narrow down which section is causing the problem and reapply the conditional formatting.

Remove Styles

Download Remove Styles, then run the file. A button wlll then be available under the “Home” tab that says “Remove Styles“. Select it, and see if things speed up a bit.

Clear Objects (Shapes)

Be careful with this solution if you wish to keep objects.

  1. Hold CTRL and press “G” to bring up the “Go To” box.
  2. Select the “Special…” button.
  3. From the “Go To Special” screen, select “Objects“, then select “OK“.
  4. Press “Delete“.

Thanks to PeterS for this solution.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Joan says

    this helps to unfreeze my file but I am needed a conditional format to show me duplicates and every time i put it back on it strts freezing again.

  2. Mespinosa says

    There’s another one I just discovered: links to other files. If you break links you might have accidentally created, you can stop some heavy lag.

  3. Brigette Webb says

    This worked awesome!!!! Without your help my spreadsheet at work was ruined by day shift!!! Cant thank you enough!!!

  4. JOSE F Carvalho says

    Nothing works in my case. The workbook freezes at 80% but ONLY IN MS Surface.
    In all other computers – laptops and desktops – opens without problems.

  5. Marc says

    The “Clear Conditional Formatting” – worked perfectly for me … I’ve been frustrated and p’ off for weeks at this. (however the computer may hang / freeze when you do this you just have to wait it out one last time) :-) Thank you!!!

  7. Romar says

    THANK YOU!! For YEARS I had a file that would not respond for 1-2 minutes periodically while working on the sheet. Sometimes it would only allow me one click before “not responding”. This was extremely frustrating. I tried everything from removing add-ins, conditionally formatting, and reinstalling the program. NOTHING worked. Finally found this help site that suggested by PeterS to remove objects. OMG!! finally a solution to my frustrating problem Thank you PeterS and techipages for sharing this. I probably would have a broken computer (LMAO) if I didn’t find this solution.

  8. ykeen says

    Thanks for these suggestions :
    My Problems was : Excel Freezes in Only One Spreadsheet
    i tried the both steps and the problem solve.

  9. Bruno Daniel says

    My work excel file is DATABASE of 9000++ contacts so its getting extermely difficult & annoying coz its always very slow & there are some symbols appearing on the sheet in a few cells. I did all the troubleshooting mentioned but no help!

  10. Leporine says

    Thanks Mitch for this help. Testing it this arvo and hoping it rids me of the pain long enough to complete my analysis! I’ve donated to Jamie’s fund. <3 goes out to her and all affected. Thanks for being so generous of spirit.

  11. Dave Barton says

    Just used the tip to remove all the conditional formatting and it worked a treat.
    Thanks

  15. Andrea says

    Yes, it worked! Did the safe mode instructions you suggested. I then went back into my excel invoices and was able to see whole page and could edit. Fingers crossed. I have Windows 10. On a Samsung laptop. Thank you!

  16. ruth says

    yey! it works for me. my excel works fine now when i disable the conditional formatting i can now encode smoothly with out excel freezing. thanks to this:)

  18. Jason says

    Excel is a two dimensional database.
    the more you put into it, the slower it gets.

    If on Windows 10,
    I’ve had better luck downgrading to Office 2013 compared to using 2016

  19. Robert Snyder says

    I, along with hundreds of people I’ve found on the internet recently, are plagued by extremely slow processing times within Excel 2016. I am looking everywhere for help. Hopefully you can provide some insight.

    I work within very large data sets/cubes, so processing time was already a bit of an annoyance when using 2013, but since I switched to 365/2016 last week it has been unbearable. My productivity has sunk drastically, as I now sometimes spend ~20-30 minutes waiting for a single pivot field to populate <1000 rows.
    I have always had a penchant for Microsoft, but as an analyst I just cannot find this to be acceptable.

    The only thing I've found that some people have had luck with is simply removing all filters before running calculations. Some people even go as far as disabling auto-calculation whenever they want to make an additional change to their file. Both of these are highly inconvenient, time-consuming, & unsustainable workarounds. And as for me, I would not even consider them to be an option while working in our larger data cubes.

    Notes: My system is clean & performs extremely well in all aspects outside of Excel 2016 (HP EliteBook, i5, 64 bit, 16gb ram, ample local storage remaining, etc.). I rarely use conditional formatting, unless absolutely called-for. I have no add-ons active. I have no viruses affecting processing speeds. I truly don't believe the issue is stemming from my machine, but Excel 2016.

    Please help in any way you can.

  20. Roge says

    Clearing Conditional Formatting (Home, Conditional Formatting, Clear Rules) fixed the issue for me as well

    I don’t know how a Conditional Format haf been set, as I have never used CF

  21. Jose Freitas Carvalho says

    Didn’t help. The file opens fine on desktop iMac (running Windows) and on laptop Toshiba ultrabook.
    It freezes on Surface, reason why I have to assume that the problem is hardware related. A big disappointment as I bought the Surface to replace the Toshiba and it is much worse.

  22. Jens Anders Salberg says

    Great tips :-) I had a small spreadsheet (< 1MB) that was slow even if saved on local drive. Removing conditional formatting solved the problem.

  24. Geoffrey Meadows says

    As many others have said already, removing formats (including conditional formatting) solved the problem in my 2.9Gb workbook. The interesting thing was that I removed them only from the first worksheet (intending to work through all the 20 or so worksheets in turn) and that solved the problem. I then tried restoring a couple of the conditional formatting schemes which involved columns up to AH and rows down to 1200 and there was no issue. The workbook now functions as quickly as it ever did (that is, instantaneous), even though there is lots of conditional formatting and other formatting in the other worksheets.

    Sorry to be so gabby!

  25. Noel says

    Thanks a Lot i was mad why excel was delaying. Thank you Sir for your useful suggestion

  26. Drizagon says

    Changing the default printer worked for me. I was unable to right-click format cells prior to changing from my network printer to a .pdf writer instead. As soon as I did that, my Excel issues were fixed. Put it back to my network printer and it stopped responding again.

  27. Kitty Kennedy says

    You are amazing. Thank you so much!! I think it was the objects that did it for me!! Cut my file by 90%

  28. Agis says

    Hi all,

    First of all I checked that my problem had to do with a specific worksheet. Having found out that, I cleared all conditional formatting from the whole sheet and then I re-inserted it but only to the cells that I needed the conditional formatting to apply. After that I had no problem! Keep in mind to do that at some points in time for all conditional formatting that you have applied, especially if the sheet is a live one and data are often inserted and deleted in that sheet.

    Great advice! Thanks a lot.

    /Agis

  29. JohnD75 says

    Hi all,

    Conditional formatting was my problem too. I removed all and re-inserted the formatting but only in the cells that i needed it to be in; previously I selected the whole column.

    Thanks for the great advice.

    John

  30. Jp says

    Finally, a site, a blogger and a solution. So so rare! Searching and moving objects was the key. Thank you so much

  31. Vikas Khair says

    Thanks Conditional Formatting was my devil too, Thanks again, it’s working fine now, is there any way to have conditional formating and have it not suck that much, may be lesser cells than the entire sheet?

  32. Carlos says

    I got a new computer with better specs than the old one. The same spreadsheet with practically the same conditional formatting worked fine in both computers. Just one day, the file in the new computer was way slow. I removed the cond. formatting and did the trick. I wonder why

  33. alex says

    at work we have a few PC’s that excel is extreamly slow and crashes with large documents (these are needed) and we have tried everything including fresh install of win 10 and swapping the computer for one with the same spec. nothing seems to fix the problem.

  34. offa68 says

    the only solution is to remove the VBA Project (personal.XLSB)
    Personal.xlsb is your Personal Macro Workbook containing macros that should be available in all workbooks. It is loaded automatically when Excel is started.

    If you really want to remove it:
    Quit all instances of Excel.
    In Windows Explorer, go to C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART (AppData is a hidden folder, you must show hidden files and folders in order to see it).
    Move Personal.xlsb out of the XLSTART folder

  36. Loneraynger says

    After months of struggling with one spreadsheet that was EXTREEMLY slow, removing conditional formatting solved the problem!

    Thanks

  37. Robert says

    I have a spreadsheet I’ve been using for several years to track expenses. I access it everyday and never had any issue with it until a month ago. Then it started “not responding” every time I made a cell entry. Tried copying and pasting “values” only in each column, removed 5 years of data, but nothing helped. Spreadsheet that was never bigger than 400k suddenly starting increasing by 100k every time I added a few cells.
    Considered downgrading to Office 2013 then read this article. Once I deleted objects that I didn’t know I had it reduced the size from 1.3M to 380k. Thanks so much for the fix!

  39. Marcos says

    Many thanks!! Removing conditional formatting from my Excel spreadsheets resolved the slowness issue. Microsoft should improve it…

  40. Kathy says

    I have a large file that has conditional formatting applied to two columns, and I want to filter for the highlighted duplicate columns, so I can copy just those rows to another workbook. When I click on the filter arrow, this is when Excel becomes unresponsive. If I wait long enough, it will usually give me the box to choose what filter to apply. but it’s not guaranteed to work.

    I wondered if it could be my computer. I only have 4 GB of memory.

  41. Carl says

    THANK YOU! Horrendous problem with extremely slow spreadsheet fixed by clearing objects!!! Excel 2016 spreadsheet with monthly updates over many years. I don’t think I use objects, but evidently one got replicated many times when I drag cells to duplicate contents. I followed the directions above explicitly and it took about ten minutes to delete all objects (that I didn’t know I had in the spreadsheet!).

  42. Mike says

    Finally found a solution to fix excel. Clearing the conditional formatting was the trick. Much appreciated.

  44. Pathikrit says

    I have same issues and every solution I saw on the net seems to say is “Do not use any fancy stuff available in Excel” that does not bode well for the software.

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