Improving Excel spreadsheet performance

Excel is an extremely powerful tool containing many useful calculation functions. However, some of these functions consume a lot of CPU power, thus slowing down the performance of a dashboard.

If you are a user who works with a lot of complicated Excel reports, you will most likely experience that some Excel reports take a very long time to recalculate whenever any data is changed within any of the spreadsheets.

How to do it…

Here are some tips with workarounds to improve Excel performance:

• Work from left to right: By default, Excel will first calculate expressions at the top-left corner of the spreadsheet and then continue to the right and downwards. Because of this, it is best to put expressions that are referencing to values in other cells to the right or to the bottom of those referenced cells. This is called forward referencing. With a small worksheet it won't make much of a difference, but for very large worksheets it will.
• Avoid using...