I would welcome any insights as to why one of my Excel files opens soooo
slowly.

I'm running Win 2K, Excel 2000, with plenty of ram and free disk space.
Normally Excel files open in less than a second. But this one has been
taking more and more time, and recently took 10 - 15 minutes. Saving takes a
long time too.

Really the file is not very big, less than a megabyte. The file has three
sheets. One sheet just has a few hundred words of text; the second sheet has
only 20 numbers and a couple of column sums. The largest sheet has 54 rows
and about 50 columns, only 12 of which are numbers, another 12 just dates.
No complicated formulas--just carrying the sum of one column over to the top
of the next column. There are no macros, no code.

It does have a large number of check-box controls (a few hundred). Could
that be a problem?

I could not find any way to delete the checkboxes in design mode, except by
selecting them one at a time...so I created a new file and cut/pasted
everything but the checkboxes. So far the reconstructed file is opening very
quickly.

Do you think:
1. the checkboxes caused a problem? (if so, I'll avoid them in future, at
least in large quantities)
2. or the file was just corrupted somehow?
3. or some other problem?

Thanks!