Greetings and happy New Year everyone, I have gotten away from excel the past year or slow simply because things have started to slow down in some of the workbooks I make/use.

I’m starting to get back into excel more, and am curious about ways to make a workbook more efficient.

Things that come to mind are:

1) Do pivot tables significantly slow things down if you have a large amount of data? (E.g. 10,000 rows)

2) named ranges are great and all for dependent drop down lists in my use case, but is having a ton of them (each as a column of a table) less or more efficient that say one dynamic named range with a Offset, Match, Countifs formula in it?

3) Ideally excel isn’t a database, but sometimes is used as such depending on the volume of data. If I use it to store a somewhat reasonable amount of data, does the structure of that data effect how hard a formula has to work to find something? Being relatively new to coding/data science, I’ve been reading about row vs column oriented databases and am curious if this applies or is relevant to data stored in excel.

Any other pro tips/advice to maximize efficiency and not bog down my sheets is welcome. I’m aware is highly context dependent, so maybe another way to phrase it is, what are some mistakes in terms of efficiency in your workbooks that you wish you learned earlier? Would love to hear some general wisdom from all you excel pros.

Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!