Excel v. 16.32 update running very slow on Mac OS Catalina

Glad it worked.

 I also, subsequently to my last message to you, found that I had to uninstall Office 33 before installing Office 31 to get it corrected.  That is what I had done successfully originally (from 32), but the person who originally suggested this cure to me later said he was successful at just installing Excel 31 over the Office 33 suite.

  I tried this after trying the upgraded 33 to see if it fixed my problem with 32 (where I started when I bought the Office upgrade).  33 wasn't a fix and when I tried the shortcut of installing only Excel 31 over 33 it didn't work.  Might be something different between his setup and mine. Sorry I suggested the shortcut to others!

  Anyway, it is definitely those files with lots of text that go south the fastest and get progressively slower and slower until they just quit.

Hi Gloria,

I did reboot my iMac into the Safe Mode, and have verified that the View option for the worksheets is set to "Normal". There was no change or improvement. I have not witnessed any similar issue in other Excel documents, although most other Excel documents I use are more database oriented, and not as financially focused (i.e., the others have few formulas, if any, compared to the "Credit Account Register" file that is exhibiting the issues).

I am not experiencing any performance issues with the other Office applications: Word, PowerPoint, Outlook. Only the "Credit Account Register" file is showing the momentary beachball spinning icon as I click on different worksheet tabs, or while selecting cells on a worksheet after scrolling up or down in the document. My wife is actually the primary user of this file used to track and monitor our household financial transactions.  When we got the iMac Pro (requiring an upgrade from Office for Mac 2011 to Office for Mac 2019 due to the 64kb version needed to run in Catalina), she immediately noticed the slowness of navigation while entering data on the worksheets and switching between worksheet tabs.  Since this is not a 365 subscription-based version of Office, I've been diligent about ensuring that the latest updates to the Office software have been installed. Neither the periodic updates to Office or updates to the Mac OS have made any difference to the strangely slow performance of navigation and data entry in Excel.  

As I mentioned in my initial post, there are no similar performance issues observed when I send the Credit Account Register file to my MacBook, which is running on MacOS Mojave V10.14.6 with Excel for Mac 2011 V 14.7.7. I can navigate and make entries as quickly as I can scroll, access a cell and type. I never see a spinning beachball icon making me pause before I can move on.

Also, to answer Jim Gordon's question (below) about whether conditional formatting is in use on the worksheets, the answer is that there are 2 conditional formatting rules as show it the following screen shot:

I don't think these two rules would be the cause of the laggy navigation in and between the worksheets on the file. I will try and capture a short video screenshot of the beachball icon experience and will post it in this thread.

UPDATE:  After much researching and experimentation, I have uncovered the solution to the laggy screen navigation and data entry on my Excel "Credit Account Register" file on my iMac Pro.  The beachball icon is no longer appearing when switching between worksheets in the file, or clicking on cells to create or edit data.  The level of performance now matches (and likely exceeds) that experienced on my MacBook Pro.

The answer was to simply go into the Excel Preferences page, click on the Error Checking feature, and to uncheck the option to "Turn on background error checking".  Once that was done, there was immediate improvement with navigation and data entry into the Excel file.  I did verify that the option on my MacBook running Mojave with Office 2011 still has the Error Checking option checked, with no adverse performance effects on the exact same Excel file.  However, with the iMac Pro running Catalina with Office 2019, there is a profound slowdown experienced unless the background error checking option is disabled. 

While I would prefer leaving the Error Checking option enabled, we'll learn to adjust to it being turned off rather than suffer the consequences of poor speed performance, and the ongoing appearance of the spinning beachball icon. Perhaps the issue will be addressed and corrected in future updates to the Excel application.