Please help me reduce Excel Memory usage.

[elkinm]

At work some people use several excel spreadsheets that they open as several Excel instances so they can see all the windows at once at different parts of the screen.

The system in question has 1.5 GB of ram and some of the Excels use upwards of 200 MB but total in task manger is below 1 GB, but Task manages shows only ~100 MB free ram.
CPU usage stays quite low to my surprise, but the PC is very slow. I think it is Paging a lot.

I have been looking at different sites like This one about optimizing Excel.
As far as I know the macros are efficient per the article, but I don't know some the sheets. Is there any quick analysis tool for that?

Also, I did not know printer drivers can eat up memory so I need to try that.

Some things I don't need is the clipboard. I usually disable it when I get the chance. Is there a way to lock it to 1 item only or other similar settings.

Any other ways to optimize Excel speed and memory usage would be appreciated.

Thank you

 

[elkinm]

Anyone,

We do have HP printers which are another big problem. Anybody know which type of drivers reduce the memory problems?

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

The system in question has 1.5 GB of ram and some of the Excels use upwards of 200 MB but total in task manger is below 1 GB, but Task manages shows only ~100 MB free ram.
CPU usage stays quite low to my surprise, but the PC is very slow. I think it is Paging a lot.

Taskmgr is a bad gauge for that stuff and 100M free memory isn't unexpected no matter what the load, any "free" memory should be used for caching until needed for something else. If you really think I/O is a problem play with perfmon a bit.

We do have HP printers which are another big problem. Anybody know which type of drivers reduce the memory problems?

Drivers for their non-crappy-SOHO printers, the printers that actually have some intelligence and process PCL and PS input on the device themselves.

 

[dderolph]

Excel... slow....with 1.5GB of RAM? It just doesn't make sense. I suspect you have other issues.

How about some more info? What OS is running on this computer? What version of Office/Excel? How large is this Excel file? Are you saying they open several instances of the same file? How is that done? I believe Excel normally does not allow that. So, do you actually mean they are opening several different Excel files at the same time?

Do this computer have a legitimate copy of Windows and Office installed? Software purchased from sources selling pirated software at unbelievably low prices often has flaws and does not run right.

How many processes are normally running in this computer? How many icons in the System Tray/Notification Area? How does it perform with other Office applications, and non-Office applications?

 

[secretanchitman]

excel wasnt even slow for me with 512MB of ram (office 2003 and office 2007). looks like you have other programs taking up memory...