A client contacted me, complaining of Excel spreadsheets that were taking far too long to open. They use Excel for creating invoices, so they have hundreds of Excel spreadsheets with light formatting and very simple calculations. When sorting the spreadsheets by size, I saw that while most of the spreadsheets ranged from 10-250k, there were a handful of spreadsheets with filesizes of 2-3 MB and more. Oddly, the filesizes weren't huge, they aren't holding much data, just a bit of formatting, maybe two or three pages of printed invoices, but they amount of data was almost identical to the smaller sized (and normal opening) spreadsheets.
When opening the file, the amount of RAM needed would spike from 3 MB to 400 MB, and it would completely occupy a single core (tested on a dual-core in the office, and my quad-core laptop), while starting. I thought that they had somehow caught some VBA code, but there are no macros, no VBA code. Ctrl+End shows 39 rows and about 12 columns (ends at M). I've even deleted the data, row by row, or column by column, until there is no data left, and it still gives me the same problem.
I've reviewed plenty of Google searches, but I've gotten nowhere. Can anyone offer any help?