Excel Chart Causes Program to Freeze

Question

I am ready to pull my hair out.  I have been having this problem for the last two weeks.  It is happening on multiple spreadsheets, but not all spreadsheets.  I have a spreadsheet with data, I create an x-y plot of the data on the sheet with the data.  Everything is fine until I try to move the plot to its own sheet.  Once I do that, Excel locks up. 

I can open up Task Manager and I see the memory used by Excel slowly increasing.  I have 192 Gig on this machine, and over about 15 minutes, Excel will slowly gobble up about 98% of it, then Excel just sits there with most all the memory.  The spreadsheet is 15 meg

I tried reducing the amount of data that I am plotting (from 300,000 points to 100,000), and that helps a little bit, because the plot now shows up in the new tab now, but freezes when ever i try to print it.  I have had no problem printing other large plots from spreadsheets, one with a plot of 722,000 points.  I am printing to a high end RICOH color laser printer that has been printing large plots just fine for several years.  Sometimes when I try to print the plot from the problematic spreadsheets, no printers show up in the print dialog box at all, even though I have 6 printers in the office.  I have also tried this on two other computers in the office and still have the same problem with these spreadsheets.  I have tried the following things with no improvement:

1. disable all add-ins -> did not help
2. disable all startup programs except antivirus -> did not help
3. Start excel in safe mode -> did not help
4. Changed the default printer to Adobe Acrobat -> did not help
5. Saved the data from the spreadsheet to a tab delimited text file then imported it into a new spreadsheet and created a new graph -> worked for a while, but then went back to the same problem 
6. I have run a Norton scan, Malwarbytes, and SAS, and nothing has shown up except adware.

I am going crazy, I need to get these plots out for a report.  Any help would be appreciated.  

I have a dual Xeon 6146 CPU, 192 Gig of memory, 27TB hard disk with 19TB free.  I am running Windows 10 Pro 64bit, Microsoft Office ProPlus 2016 64bit.

Answer 1

As a follow up I have tried two other things

1. I completly reinstalled Office on my computer.  I brought in the text file and recreated the spreadsheet.  It did not help, Excel froze up.
2. I brought in the text file to a computer with only Office 2016 and Norton on it.  I brought in the text file and recreated the spreadsheet.  All was fine until I tried to print the spreadsheet.  The printer dialog box showed no printers available, and excel froze up.  It is using a constant 28% of the cpu on a 4 core i7 CPU.  It is fixed at around 268 MB of the 16 Gig memory system.

It is looking like it is an Excel bug.  Until recently I have routinely created much larger spreadsheets with much more complex graphs of 6 to 7 hundred thousand points with no problems.  As of around 2 weeks ago that all went down the toilet.