I recently purchased a copy of Excel 2001, upgrading from 98. OS 9.1 on
a Supermac clone. 640 MB physical RAM. 50,000 K memory allocated to
Excel. Regarding the problem I'll describe, I've experimented with auto
calc both on and off and with VM both on and off. Doesn't affect the
results.
When I enter data to the cells that are used in calculations, Excel is
recalculating and sounds like it is writing to the harddisk with each
entry. This can mean a couple of second delay every time I enter a
number and hit return/enter. This long delay never occurred with Excel
98 although it, too, does appear to write to disk after each entry. (I
tried it, just to be sure.)

I've tried auto-calculate on and off, VM on and off, and I've check to
see if the auto-save add-in is installed, and it is NOT.
I've done a check for extension conflicts, and if I boot-up with no
extensions, start Excel, it then reinstalls the extensions it wants, and
the slowness is still there.

in article 3F1EC569.4050203[at]stroudsautorebuild.com, Doug at
doug[at]stroudsautorebuild.com wrote on 7/23/2003 1:27 PM:

> I recently purchased a copy of Excel 2001, upgrading from 98. OS 9.1 on
> a Supermac clone. 640 MB physical RAM. 50,000 K memory allocated to
> Excel. Regarding the problem I'll describe, I've experimented with auto
> calc both on and off and with VM both on and off. Doesn't affect the
> results.
> When I enter data to the cells that are used in calculations, Excel is
> recalculating and sounds like it is writing to the harddisk with each
> entry. This can mean a couple of second delay every time I enter a
> number and hit return/enter. This long delay never occurred with Excel
> 98 although it, too, does appear to write to disk after each entry. (I
> tried it, just to be sure.)
>
> I've tried auto-calculate on and off, VM on and off, and I've check to
> see if the auto-save add-in is installed, and it is NOT.
> I've done a check for extension conflicts, and if I boot-up with no
> extensions, start Excel, it then reinstalls the extensions it wants, and
> the slowness is still there.
>
How much hard disk space is available? Have you defragmented your drive
recently? Since you have 50M allocated to Excel, it should work best with VM
on and set to 1MB more than actual RAM in the machine. If you can afford it,
try upping the RAM allocated to Excel to 80MB.

--
Bob Greenblatt [Excel MVP]
Bobgreenblatt[at]msn.com
www.bandlassoc.com