OpenOffice Calc getting slower and slower

Question

I am running OpenOffice 3.2.0 Calc on my Ubuntu (10.04) desktop. I have a huge data entry task to complete today and Calc is getting slower and slower moving between cells on the sheet.

When I rename my user profile folder (/home/username/.openoffice.org/3/user) to user.old so that OO creates a new profile, everything seems to run great for about 30 minutes. Then it gets slower again. I've renamed the user folder about 5 times and it's getting old :)

I've tried various settings including undo steps to 3, lower memory requirements, fewer auto-replace settings, no spell checking, etc. They don't have any effect on the new user profile - it just grinds to a crawl after 30 minutes or so.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? What is causing this?

EDIT: My data entry task feels huge but the amount of data isn't - 18 columns by 900 rows so far. So I can't imagine that is causing the problem

Answer 1

How much ram do you have and what are the specs of the machine? You could try creating a ramdisk and moving the openoffice profile and dataset to that.

create ramdisk then move openoffice profile profile

If it's still being sluggish then it's time to learn R :p