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Speed & performance

Making a slow Google Sheet fast again

Sheets does not get slow at random. There is always a specific cause, and it is usually one of six.

The usual culprits: whole-column references in ARRAYFORMULA, volatile functions like NOW, TODAY, RAND and INDIRECT recalculating everything on every edit, conditional formatting rules applied to a million rows, IMPORTRANGE chains, hundreds of thousands of empty-but-formatted cells inflating the file, and lookup formulas doing a linear scan per row where one QUERY would do.

We profile the workbook, tell you which of those is actually costing you, and quote the fix. Often the answer is a restructure rather than a rewrite, and often it takes a workbook from thirty seconds to open down to two.

You probably recognise at least one of these

  • 'Still loading' on open, or a spinner on every edit
  • Filtering or sorting freezing the tab
  • Collaborators being unable to edit at the same time without conflicts
  • The file approaching the 10 million cell limit
  • IMPORTRANGE cells that show stale values or #ERROR under load

What you get

  • A written performance diagnosis naming each cause and its cost
  • Formula rewrites replacing volatile and row-by-row calculations
  • Range and formatting cleanup, with the dead cell count reported before and after
  • Archive strategy for historical rows that do not need to be live
  • Before/after load and recalculation timings

How the engagement runs

Diagnose

A fixed-price profile of the workbook with a written finding.

Quote the fix

You can take the diagnosis and do it yourself; plenty of clients do.

Remediate

In a copy, with timings measured at each step.

Verify

Before/after numbers, not impressions.

Questions we get asked

Will you break my formulas?
Work happens in a copy and every rewrite is checked to produce identical output against your existing data before it replaces anything.
What if the sheet is simply too big?
Then we will say so and propose the right architecture — archiving, splitting, or moving the heavy data to BigQuery with Sheets as the front end.
Can you make IMPORTRANGE faster?
Usually by replacing it. A scheduled Apps Script copy is faster and far more reliable than a live IMPORTRANGE chain.

Related services

Formula help

The smallest job we take, and often the one that unblocks the most people.

From $9024–72 hours

Dashboards

A dashboard is only useful if it is current, honest and fast. Most of the ones we are asked to fix are none of the three.

From $4505–10 working days

Data cleaning

Cleaning the file once is worth almost nothing. The job is to make the next export clean itself.

From $1502–5 working days

Tell us what it needs to do

Share the file or describe the outcome. We reply with scope, price and a delivery date.

Get a fixed quote