Page Faults - Excel

[dbdg]

I've got a 5MB spreadsheet that I'm working on which contains quite a few arrays.

I been working on it this morning and so far Excel.exe has used over 1hr of CPU time, really is difficult to work with at the moment. I added a few columns into Taskmanager and the Page Faults figure is up to 30 million and rising.

On checking the help file taskmanager reckons you get a page fault everytime the system has to retrieve a value from the disk because it ican't find it in memory.

What does this suggest?

1. Excel is bollocks
2. My system doesn't have enough memory
3. Arrays are just intensive in Excel
4. Nothing

[GNEP]

Combination of 1 2 and 3. Doing ANYTHING in Excel the way they want you to is usually a mistake. Slightly more cumbersome solutions can often be far less resource intensive - eg a workbook with multiple pivot tables will be v. large and slow. Do the same thing using dropdown boxes driving row/columns for VLOOKUPS will result in a file less than a tenth of the size which also runs MUCH faster. So I suggest trying to get the same results using a different method... experiment with a few and see which one works best.

[Gurm]

As for the page faults... make sure you have enough virtual RAM, and if that doesn't help reinstall Excel. Frontpage used to GPF on me a lot, a quick reinstall took care of that - something had just gotten munged up.

[dbdg]

Work machine, don't have a lot of options with regards to what I can do / see. I have 512MB Ram and I think Virtual memory is set at about 1.3GB. I'll see if I can get them to reinstall Excel though, just in case something got borked.

I can't really do what I want to any other way (not that I can think of anyway). Not using any charts, just a few arrays, vlookups and vlookups with arrays as their ranges.