Excel indicates Slow Workbook

Spreadsheets Microsoft Excel
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1

For the Tiller Foundation Template in Excel, I am getting this warning message:

“SLOW WORKBOOK? 98% of your workbook has unused formatting and metadata that can be optimized to improve performance. Button text: [Check Performance]”

I do understand what Excel is saying here - if you have large “unused” rows or columns then there is an internal shortcut in the file protocol to by-pass those cells for formatting or calculation purposes. Tiller is doing something to populate blank cells and Excel is offering to

Has the TIller team tested out pressing that button? If there are elements that need to be preserved, then it shouldn’t be pressed. However, that button could vastly improve the performance of that spreadsheet running in Excel.

Thoughts?

–Skip

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Hi @skippu Skip,

The Tiller team has not published anything about the Check Performance command to my knowledge.

I did a post about using the Check Performance command and you can read about my results here:

How to reduce time to open a workbook, improve performance and reduce workbook size

There is another post by @bdunks about how to reduce the file size using a different process found here:

How to Reduce File Size by 6MB in the Tiller Foundation Template

Check the posts out and let me know if you have any questions.

Clint

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Hello, I’m brand new to Tiller and I’m also now getting this message after a few days. Should we or should we not press the Excel optimize button? I don’t want to mess anything up, this seems to work great and I don’t notice any real slow speeds loading. Thanks

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@jmsbaker Hi Jeff. Since you are brand new to Tiller, I would recommend you not accept the recommended changes to the template that the Check Performance command recommends. Not all the recommendations are necessary, especially the formatting ones. The command is great for identifying potential issues and making suggestions.

There are a few easy manual steps you can take depending on what your personal situation is.

A few questions for you:

  • Are you using Excel thru the web or with Office on your computer?
  • Windows or Mac?
  • Computer specs (RAM and CPU if older or minimal can impact)
  • How many transactions do you have loaded right now?
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I’m Using Window 11, Excel on my PC, 8gig of ram and just 480 transactions as of today.
Excel does not seem to be slow, it’s just the message pops up every so often.

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@jmsbaker Ok, I have received that too with a new template. If you are familiar with Excel, you can manually make some of the changes that Check Performance would do. Feel free to start the “Check Performance” command and review each recommendation. It provides an option to accept. You don’t have to accept the recommendations. I learned a lot from doing this. I also created a copy of my template and ran the Check Performance against it. It is always important to have a backup copy(s) of your main Tiller template just in case.

  1. I ran into a few issues “accepting” all the Check Performance “formatting” recommendations. You can review each recommendation and decide if you want to accept them. You can always manually make some of the changes. An easy example is where the whole row(s) or column(s) has been formatted with a color when only a small portion of the row(s) or column(s) is required.
  2. The same recommendations can be applied to community solutions if you are using any of those.
  3. Delete any unused rows in the Category tab, Accounts tab and Transactions tab after your last entry
  4. If you don’t use the Spendings tab you can delete it. Otherwise, you can unhide the tab, select the table and unhide columns. Then you can delete the rows after the last entry taking into view the newly unhidden data rows.
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