Excel 2007 iterating formula half a million rows

[fibbermcghee]

Hi all,

Well, I've done it somehow. I have a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 in which I keep all our accounts. Since I had to come up with a Minimum Required Distribution this year, I tried tacking it onto later columns in this sheet. Worked great, once. Then the formula I used:

=IF($L9="","",$L9/$K$3)

which was supposed to follow the IRA's changing value. But, what it did was iterate for 500,000 rows, making a 12MB file out of a 16K file. Now I can't get rid of that formula. I've deleted it, but it's obviously hiding somewhere in the markup for that spreadsheet, and I can't stop it. In a word, HELP.

(I've already copied the necessary part of the spreadsheet to a new one, so that's no problem, but I'd sure like to know how stop this thing.

Any ideas? Bill2? Irene?

 

[Ranger4]

Have a look at this MS website to see if it helps you.

https://support.office.microsoft.co...cd4-9bac-f57dcda7b73a&ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB

Also this Youtube video, while very simple & brief might help as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mk2QZnLiG0

 

[fibbermcghee]

Thanks a lot, Ranger4. I finally decided to quit while I was behind and just redid the spreadsheet. Sure would like to know how I ended up with 1,048,065 rows, though. I got rid of the formula, but couldn't get rid of the rows. I'm sure the formula at one time had them all sitting there waiting for eventual data, but after the formula left the rows danced on. I've still got it, I'll pull it up and have another go, someday. Thanks again.

 

[Ranger4]

Thanks for your reply & glad to hear you have it sorted out.

Did it end duplicating a whole lot of data, which could explain the sudden expansion of the spreadsheet. Obviously something went wrong when you used the formula, so the formula may be the problem.