If you’re reading this, chances are you’ll recognize some or all of the following issues.Ĭalculations in your Google Sheets are super slow and the dreaded loading bar makes an appearance every time you make a change to your Sheet. (And woe betide anyone who made a mistake with a formula!)Īlthough we’ve come a long way from those days, if you work with data a lot, chances are you’ll find yourself coming up against slow spreadsheets at some stage.Ī lot of the tips that follow are generally good spreadsheet practices anyway, so even if you only work with small Sheets at the moment, they’re worth implementing now. If you were lucky they’d be finished when you returned. I remember the old days when you would set hundreds of thousands of VLOOKUP formulas loose on your dataset and then go out for lunch. Know when it’s time to move to a database.Understand changes in the cloud can take time to propagate.Other troubleshooting tips for slow Google Sheets.Split your slow Google Sheet into separate Sheets.Use Filter, Unique and Array_Constrain functions to create smaller helper tables.Manage expensive formulas with a control switch.Use IF statements to manage formula calls.Remove volatile functions or use with caution.Convert formulas to static values wherever possible.Measure a Google Sheet’s calculation speed.What follows in this article is some suggested optimization strategies and some research into what causes slow Google Sheets. How can you speed up a slow Google Sheet?įirst off, this is a difficult question to answer because there are so many factors that may or may not be causing you to have a slow Google Sheet. We’ve all been there, stuck watching the little loading bar creep slowly, frustratingly to its conclusion:

(Updated Jan 2022 to reflect the increase in the cell limit of Google Sheets to 10 million.)

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