LibreOffice Calc 6.2.8.2 is loading VERY slowly & hangs up

Hi,

My LibreOffice Calc 6.2.8.2 is loading painfully slowly. The progress bar gets to about 90% & hangs there for a minute. The progress bar then disappears & I’m left with a blank screen. If I click on the blank screen, Calc eventually opens. I just updated to 6.2.8.2 because it had just started doing the same thing in the previous version. It also saves very slowly & had been doing the same in the previous version. The Calc file I’m trying to open is 208 KB & is an ODS file. My original file was built in Excel. I opened it with LibreOffice Calc when I switched from Excel to Calc 6 months ago & now it’s an ODS file. I resave the file with a new name every month, as I need to keep a running tally of certain things on the spreadsheet. I’ve been running Calc on a Windows 10 PC with no issues, other than the slow saving, since I started using LibreOffice. The slow loading only occurs with Calc, not Writer, & only with that particular Calc file. I can open other Calc ODS files quickly. Any idea how to fix this?

More information:

*The Calc file I’m having trouble with is a workbook containing 11 sheets.
*Several of the sheets contain cells linked to cells on other sheets within the same workbook.
*I tried opening a new/empty Calc workbook, added in 11 new sheets, & copy/pasted the data from my problem Calc workbook, to the new one.

  • I adjusted the formulas to refer to cells within this workbook, because they were now referring to that cell in the old problem workbook.
    *I did 1 sheet at a time, then saved the workbook after each new sheet addition. It saved VERY quickly.
    *I had no slow saving or opening of this file UNTIL I added a sheet that contains a LOT of comments. As soon as I added that heavily commented sheet, the saving speed slowed immensely. I also experienced the slow opening, hanging up at 90% open, followed by the blank screen that I was experiencing with the original workbook.
    *I made a copy of the file & tried deleting different sheets & the problem disappears when the commented sheet is removed & reappears when it’s added back in.
    *Other sheets have comments AND links & don’t cause the problem as long as THAT 1 sheet is removed. YES, the comments are necessary.

Some more information:

*The heavily commented sheet is definitely causing the slow saving & slow opening, then hanging up problem. There are no circular references.
*I tried deleting all the comments, saved the workbook, and it was still slow.
*I closed the workbook & tried reopening it without the comments on that 1 sheet. The slow opening followed by hanging up still occurred.
*I then also tried deleting the 2 formulas on that page, which left nothing but a list of data on the sheet, resaved (still slow), closed the workbook, reopened it, & experienced the same slow open & hang up.
*I deleted the sheet, saved (very fast save), closed the workbook, & reopened it quickly & without any problems.

*I also tried the suggested answer below.
*I opened a fresh workbook & inserted sheets from the original problem workbook as suggested below. I saved the new workbook & tried to reopen it. I experienced the slow open & hang up with the new workbook too.
*There was also a warning across the top of the new workbook sheets: “Automatic update of external links has been disabled.” There is an “enable content” button to click on the warning. I clicked that link & a progress bar appeared at the bottom of the page that said “updating external links.” The name of my workbook, at the top of the screen, was immediately followed by (not responding), which eventually disappeared when the update progress bar disappeared.
*I closed the new workbook, reopened it, & experienced the same slow open, followed by hang up, & blank screen as the original. However, when the new workbook opens, I always receive the warning across the top of the new workbook sheets: “Automatic update of external links has been disabled.” This is not an improvement!

I can not figure out why that sheet is causing problems now, when it has been in that workbook for over a year.

  1. Create a new empty spreadsheet
  2. Sheet > Insert sheet > From file. Browse for the file and insert it
  3. Save the new file.

You have now identified the problem sheet.

Continue the diagnosis by deleting content and/or individual comments in the problem sheet to see if you can identify exactly where the problem is.

Have you got a “circular reference” where something ends up calling itself as in “A calls B … which calls C … which calls A”. Search the forum with circular. eg If function question circular reference

  1. Is one of the other sheets referring to something in the “problem” sheet and so the problem is not actually on the “problem sheet” but only shows itself when the “problem sheet” is present.

  2. Can you make a new test “problem sheet” and use it instead of the “problem sheet”. Does that fix it?

  3. Is it hanging permanently? Or does it start working after 10 mins? 30 mins?

  4. Update links. Is Tools > Options > Calc > General the same for both new and old files?

  1. YES, one of the other sheets has 2 cells linked to 2 cells on the problem sheet. I tried deleting that sheet & leaving the problem sheet intact, but had the same problem opening the workbook.

  2. I created a new “problem” sheet & copied the content from the old problem sheet over to it. I deleted the original problem sheet, saved the workbook & closed it. I had the same problem opening the workbook.

  3. It does not hang permanently. When I open the workbook, the “loading” progress bar appears at the bottom of the screen & it fills to about 90%, then just sits there for about a minute, then I get a blank screen (not the page that should appear) for another minute, then the workbook finally opens fully. Yesterday it opened & the entire workbook was unstable. The screen image was jerking, I had trouble moving from cell to cell. It stopped doing it today. I checked & it wasn’t happening anywhere else on my PC.

  4. YES. Tools > Options > Calc > General is the same in both old & new files

Without seeing the file I cannot think of anything more to suggest. It seems that LO is working hard doing something so you need to find out what.

In large Writer documents it can take 20 mins or more to lay out a large document with many footnotes and images so as to get the page count correct for the ToC. But I cannot see anything similar here.

Set Tools > Options > Calc > Calculate > Iterations …, to 10 steps and Tools > Options > Calc > Formula …, to Never recalculate.

Can you set up a new “problem sheet” from scratch - don’t create it from the “problem sheet”.

I shall be away for 2 weeks …

Thanks for your help.

I made the iteration change. It had been set to 100, instead of the 10 that you suggested.
Formula was already set to “never calculate.”

I’ll try rebuilding the problem sheet from scratch. It will take some time. It is a running list of $ amounts that I must maintain for the year, as well as some other details about the individual entries.

I started this workbook years ago in Excel & just make a new copy every month. I bought a new PC in August 2019 & didn’t want to pay for a subscription to excel. I installed LibreOffice & used it to open my excel file. It seemed slow, so I turned it into an ods file. Everything worked fine until a week ago. the file opened quickly until then. I think I updated LibreOffice around that time too.

I switched to LibreOffice in August 2019 after purchasing a new PC with Windows 10 installed. I didn’t think my Excel 2007 was compatible with Windows 10, so I didn’t reinstall it. The Libre Office Calc file that I’m having problems with seems to add new problems daily & I can’t lose the data in the file. I just tried reinstalling Excel 2007 & it seems compatible with Windows 10 after all. I opened my problem Calc file & saved it as an Excel file instead. I closed it & reopened it. It opened instantly. There is no hint of the open & hang issue I was having with the same file in Libre Calc. It also saves instantly. There is definitely a bug in Calc.

I had a similar problem with a file converted from xlsx to ods. I think this conversion is the variable causing the problem.

Exporting sheets from that workbook resulted in the same issue, but when I copied and pasted just the cells with data into a new ods file it was fixed.

I have almost the same problem (LO 7.0.1.2 x64, Win10 up-to-date) - even if I re-open the file without closing LO, it still hangs at 90% for 30s or so. It’s been a .ods from the start, with an LO Basic macro, and also has 11 sheets (mostly trivial); but no comments, and no sheets reference any other sheet. I think this has only been happening for the last few weeks.

I had the same problem with an Excel 2010 file. Calc would load very slowly and then freeze. If I could get it to open at all, saving as ods would corrupt it, making it unusable in Excel or Calc. I solved the problem by opening the Excel file in Google Sheets online, and saving it as an ods and downloading it back to my PC. The ods generated by Google sheets would then open in Calc with no issues.
(Windows 10, MS Office 2010, LibreOffice 7.0)