Excel freezing when applying a Filter on large data set

Question

I've been working on EXCEL with large data sets for a course I'm enrolled in. Recently when I tried to use in a filter in a table, I was reformatting in preparation to conduct analysis the program began to start freezing. This has only been in the past week. I've tried the following fixes

1. emptying the cache within Excel
2. Removing add-ons in safe mode
3. opening the file in safe mode
4. disabling the hardware graphics acceleration
5. clearing the items in MSConfig
6. copying the data to a new blank excel document and attempting again
7. removing the filters, saving them as a new document, then applying the filters
8. online repair for office
9. local repair for office
10. uninstalling and reinstalling office
11. reconfigured the display setting for optimized compatibility instead of best appearance

I've included a snip from the task manager for what the issue is looking like. usually, something about printer settings pops up on the first attempt. but still freezes on subsequent loading. It eventually does display the data but is near impossible to get to work. However, on another family PC with less ram it works perfectly. Who's got any ideas?

freezes here

LARGE amount of CPU power being pulled

data is being displayed but am unable to interact with anything in the worksheet

Answer 1

I am having the exact same issue. Following this

Answer 2

Unfortunately I think the issue is the fact that the data is formatted as a table. I basically have the same problem but the more filters I apply and the more complex they are (multiple columns, multiple filters in each column, more data), the slower Excel gets, and it usually leads to Excel freezing and me killing Excel in task manager.

I'm using Excel 365 and my current work around is this:

1. Duplicate the sheet tab
2. Converting the table in the duplicate sheet tab to a range
3. Turning on filters
4. Work as normal in the duplicate sheet tab
   • Few things to note:
   • Clearing the filter via home > editing > sort & filter > clear causes Excel to not respond (for me, don't know why). Clearing the filters individually is my current workaround.
5. Transfer the changes (something like copy/paste, vlookup, index/match, etc) to the original sheet tab.

It's just a work around I found, and sometimes I can perform the filters in the formatted tables if I simply reboot the computer. But for me the issue happens at random over time so rebooting isn't always viable.

Hope this helped, and I hope this can be fixed soon.