I just started having a weird computer problem this week. For some reason my computer is having trouble opening Excel spreadsheets saved on a particular network drive. When I try to open them, it can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5+ minutes for them to finally open. During this time, nothing else gets bogged down, neither does it sound like my computer is thinking particularly hard. I can open Excels spreadsheets that are local and on my personal network drive fine. I can also open with no problem, other types of files from the network drive in question. Additionally, I can copy and paste Excel files from the drive in question to my desktop with no delay and then open them quickly. Do you have any ideas what could be causing such a problem? Our IT department insists it must be a ram issue but that doesn’t make sense to me. In fact they doubled my ram this morning and the problem was not helped. Part of their rationale is that they just updated Kapersky for the first time in a year and it must take a long time to scan Excel files. Nobody else has encountered this problem though. Any thoughts?

I've seen this before where a user had many network drives mapped, and some of those mappings were no longer valid or had some kind of connectivity issue. We disconnected the invalid ones, and then everything ran smoothly again. I recommend that you check any other mappings you have on your computer.

Colin,

Thanks, I'll mention that as a possibility to our IT department. Unfortunately I'm not privileged to remap on my work computer. Thanks again!

Joshua

I ran into the same problem recently which occurred after installing a software validation program Excel addin. The problem it is not only slow in opening the files, but also it does not paste your copied formulas into another files. I was able to correct the problem by going into control pannel/ uninstall programs, and I uninstalled that specific microsoft excel validation Add In. Once that was uninstalled, it all went back to normal without even rebooting the computer.

Thanks nowizzard, I found something similar at the following URL:

Slow Opening of Excel Files through a Network - MS Office Support

They recommended uninstalling the updates KB2502786 and KB2541025. I went to Add or Remove programs selecting to show updates and found that KB2541025 for Excel had been installed on 07/05/11, the same day I started experiencing the problem. Apparently, this update has to be uninstalled before the other one will show in the Add or Remove Programs to also be removed.

Unfortunately, I'm at the mercy of our IT department on this. I cannot uninstall the updates so I'm waiting to hear back from them if they will uninstall or get me a copy of office 2007. I'm hoping for the first option as 2007 is ugly.