This is a question to help me decide how to approach the new year starting with a clean workbook, or just modifying my existing one.
If I clear out balance history for 2025 will that return my speedier downloads?
Or is it also the number of transactions I have?
Or both?
Or neither?
I do have a workbook where I’ve kept everything since 2022, so I won’t be losing anything critical if I start fresh.
Are you using Excel or Sheets?
For Excel, I have found that large or many Pivot tables, many community solutions and a lot of conditional formatting impact performance more than the number of transactions. Additionally, some of the Tiller tables have many extra rows inserted when they are not necessarily required. Rows are added to the transaction table after the header row. Any blank rows after your last transaction row within the table can be deleted. The spending trends table can be reduce as well.
There is an Excel command called “Check Performance”. It is found under the Review menu. I did a post on it last year called How to reduce time to open a workbook, improve performance and reduce workbook size. If you run it you will be able to review the results before approving any changes it would make.
For Sheets, Mark did a post called Improving Performance Example with a similar performance command.
Sheets! Forgot to say that.
Good evening @kingsdotter .
You could try installing this add-on. Should tell you how big your sheet is.
If you do not have too many formula intensive additional sheets installed keeping historical data should not be a problem.
I’m in this same position and am currently auditing my sheet for blanks using @Mark.S post about Google sheets performance specifically the size audit tool, getting rid of as many blanks as possible and altering the net worth sheet for now, will report back with further results later
My first pass brought my total number of cells down from 2.47 million cells to 2.15 and eliminated 6 unused sheets right off the bat with more on the chopping block soon to follow
Hopefully the performance will improve but I’m thinking about just starting fresh next year anyways. 
Something I like to do is to limit the overall calculation load of templates by modifying their helper section Transactions sheet references.
Like in this example, I limit the Transactions to 1000 rows (about one year’s worth of transactions for me).
So, I may have say 10,000 transactions, but the calculations only run on 1000 of them.
I don’t need all formulas in the spreadsheet running on all the data, all the time.
Every template uses this convention, so it’s easy to find and there’s typically a nearby cell to control the limit. Notice how the usual B2:B is now B2:B1000.
=IF(PERF_OFF,PERF_TXN_OFF_ROWS,PERF_TXN_ONE_YEAR_ROWS)
And sometimes I’ll add an on/off switch check box where I have the template basically disabled when I’m not using it, and turn on when I want to use it.
=IF(PERF_OFF + CASHBACK_OFF, PERF_TXN_OFF_ROWS, PERF_TXN_ALL_ROWS)
The examples above are using formulas with named ranges, but it could simply just be a cell with the row limit number in it.
good tip @Mark.S
