Anneke Roos

Fifteen months is not that long, be slightly kinder to yourself. The N4 to N3 gap is roughly double the vocabulary, so part of the flat feeling is just that the next step is bigger than the last one.

Also check for blank cells inside the source range, not just at the bottom of it. And make sure the pivot source is a table or a dynamic range — if the range says A1:F3000 and you now have 4,000 rows, the pivot silently ignores the rest and you will get stranger problems later.

Rebuilding does not fix text dates, it just makes you do the work twice. Fix the column first.

Bitrate, and specifically you are probably on constant bitrate with a high target and an even higher ceiling. For a ten minute 1080p25 deliverable that is mostly people talking, two pass VBR at a target around 8 to 10 Mbps with a maximum of 12 to 16 lands you near 700 MB and looks identical on any normal monitor. 1.8 GB over ten minutes is roughly 24 Mbps, which is broadcast territory for content that does not need it. Also check your audio is not sitting at uncompressed PCM — that alone can be 100 MB on a ten minute file.

Two pass VBR costs you export time and nothing else. Use it for anything a client has to download.

Just wash it twice, problem solved.

It happens every time someone copies and pastes formatted rows. Delete them all and reapply once to the used range. Check the used range itself while you are there — Ctrl+End sometimes lands on row 900,000 because of old formatting, and everything is slower for it.

Not normal. 8,000 rows should feel instant, so something in there is either volatile or scanning whole columns. The order I check:

• Formulas referencing A:A instead of A2:A8000. Fifteen columns of SUMIFS over full columns means a million row scan per formula, per recalculation.
• Volatile functions: OFFSET, INDIRECT, TODAY, NOW, RAND. Any one of them forces the whole workbook to recalculate on every keystroke.
• Conditional formatting applied to entire columns, or rules that multiplied when people copied rows. Open the rules manager — I have seen 4,000 rules in a sheet that needed three.
• Array formulas or SUMPRODUCT over full columns, same problem as the first point.
  Fix those and it drops under a second.

The using locale option was the whole thing. It parsed the trailing minus correctly with no formulas at all.

One more argument for consolidating: INDIRECT is volatile, so 40 sheets of SUMIFS built on it will recalculate on every keystroke. On a workbook this size you will feel it, and it gets worse every month you add.

Confirm it is actually hum before you chase the room. Look at the spectrum: mains hum is a hard line at 50 or 60 with harmonics stacked above it. If it is broad and low instead, you have a different problem — clothing rub, a failing connector, or the lav power supply itself.

For the text-number version of this specifically, the fastest one-off fix is: select the column, Data, Text to Columns, leave every default alone, press Finish. It converts them in place in about two seconds. Ugly, and it does not survive the next import, but it unblocks you while you sort the import out properly.