We have a user that uses Excel 2003 for a few of their acturial formulae. At the moment they are using a ESX host VM with 2 gig of RAM and a single core. The issue is that their huge burgeoning spreadsheet (some 35000 rows of intricately linked data) takes an age to make updates to. I was wondering if moving them to Office 2007 or even the newer 2010 might help improve things. I was thinking along these lines as changes to the VM side are somewhat blocked off (I am first/second line) and I have heard that the cell limit in the later versions of Excel has been bumped up (and one would hope that efficiency has improved with that move). Does anyone think that this change would be enough or can they recommend any, ideally open source, alternatives that have more efficient processing of large spreadsheets. I am sure that such an intricate sheet may be better off in a proper database style environment (e.g. Access) but am looking for any pointers I can use to add to my suggestions.
Ta
Tim