
(And woe betide anyone who made a mistake with a formula!)Īlthough we’ve come a long way from those days, if you work with data a lot, chances are you’ll find yourself coming up against slow spreadsheets at some stage.Ī lot of the tips that follow are generally good spreadsheet practices anyway, so even if you only work with small Sheets at the moment, they’re worth implementing now. If you were lucky they’d be finished when you returned. I remember the old days when you would set hundreds of thousands of VLOOKUP formulas loose on your dataset and then go out for lunch.

Use Filter, Unique and Array_Constrain functions to create smaller helper tables.Manage expensive formulas with a control switch.Use IF statements to manage formula calls.Remove volatile functions or use with caution.


We’ve all been there, stuck watching the little loading bar creep slowly, frustratingly to its conclusion: (Updated Jan 2022 to reflect the increase in the cell limit of Google Sheets to 10 million.)
