Computer Related > Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File Computing Issues
Thread Author: zippy Replies: 6
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 Thu 30 Jul 20 11:59 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - zippy
Just an observation really.

I have a huge Excel file that I need to review. 24mb on the disk, 200+mb raw data.

Excel struggles to open it and when open takes half a day to undertake the simplest of actions - like unmerge a cell.

Open office is whizzing through the amendments. It's only a shame that it doesn't save back in to the new XLSX format.
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 Thu 30 Jul 20 12:21 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - tyrednemotional
...can you not use "Save As", and select XLSX from the drop-down menu?

I've only used Libre Office (which is the other "fork" of the Openoffice project - common source) and I'm pretty sure that, in that, whilst the default save for an XLSX file, once opened, was in an open office document format, you could override it via "Save As" (and i think the later versions had augmented XLS with XLSX as an option - Google leads me to believe so).

Not currently installed on my machines, so I can't test.
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 Thu 30 Jul 20 12:47 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - smokie
You probably want to turn off auto-recalc if it's on.
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 Thu 30 Jul 20 12:57 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - smokie
Sorry, I should have clarified.

Default behaviour with Excel is to recalculate each formula etc when a spreadsheet ios opened, and when a change is made to a formula. Which mostly is sensible.

But if you are managing large data you don't want ti rippling through thousands of formulae each time you change something so you can change it to manual. In my version it's under Formulas, Calculation Options.

maybe Open Office defaults to that, or recognises the size of the spreadsheet and sets itself accordingly - or maybe it's simply quicker.

Either way, beware if using manual calc as it is all too easy to fail to update it once you've made your changes!!


EDIT: Crossed posts with Manatee!
Last edited by: smokie on Thu 30 Jul 20 at 12:58
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 Thu 30 Jul 20 12:52 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - Manatee
Have you turned off autorecalculation? If you have vast numbers of lookups for example it will do them all every time you open it.

When you do recalculate manually, IIRC shift+F9 recalculates the active sheet only, not the entire workbook - can be risky but saves some processing.

That said, I have had this sort of problem with Excel - it feels like a bug to me, once in a while I seem to do something that just won't work properly, even when I check and check again, and I end up working round it.

Have you got any 'solve' operations going on?
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 Fri 31 Jul 20 14:58 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - zippy
Thanks for all your replies folks.

It was a nominal report from Sage. Huge file.

All options turned off in Sage re recalc etc.

I guess open office comes with less baggage, is more efficient and / or has a better file format.

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 Fri 31 Jul 20 23:53 
 Open Office Beats Excel with Excel File - smokie
"All options turned off in Sage re recalc etc."

... guess you mean Excel. In which case I'm surprised. I worked alongside some scientist boffins who regularly crunched massive amounts of data modelling stuff in Excel, with no problems I was aware of. Mind you, they didn't half know it well...
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