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Fix Excel Freezing or Slow

Posted on by 20 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.

Reader Interactions

Comments

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

  2. 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.

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

  4. 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

  5. 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

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

  7. 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?

  8. 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

  9. 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.

  10. 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

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

    Thanks

  13. 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!

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

  16. 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.

  17. 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!).

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

  20. 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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