A bank approached RCOR with an issue they were experiencing with their Excel spreadsheets. They reported that the spreadsheets were running very slowly, with Excel freezing up at times. The bank suspected that the problem was related to the size of the files, but they weren't sure. They wanted an Excel expert to investigate the issue and recommend any improvements that could be implemented by intermediate level users. To get a better understanding of the problem, we looked over a few of the bank's spreadsheets and conducted benchmarking tests on their machines. We also removed formulas and code from sheets to see if the issue was related to these elements. As it turned out, the freezing was occurring periodically, so we disabled auto-saving as files can re-calculate fully when saved. However, we noticed that the Excel files were freezing even when a user was simply moving the cursor, which is not typically an issue with Excel. To investigate further, we wrote short macros to monitor when each freeze occurred and were able to start predicting such events in advance. We then analyzed the system logs in Excel and were able to identify a network issue that was affecting a whole room of workers. By identifying and addressing this issue, we were able to improve the performance of the bank's Excel spreadsheets.
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