SYMPTOM
When refreshing Microsoft Excel sheets with Strategy Office, the user may experience uncharacteristically long refresh times, possibly on the scale of minutes or hours, even when the amount of data is small and report execution is expected to complete in a matter of seconds.
CAUSE
One possible cause for this scenario is that the user has many unnecessary or duplicate cell styles in their Excel workbook. This can happen if the user copies and pastes data between Excel workbooks or merges workbooks often. Sometimes, even hundreds of cell styles can accumulate in a single workbook, causing excessive delays during the Strategy report display process. Cell styles can be easily diagnosed as the cause by looking for an entry similar to the following in the Strategy Office log file (moilog):
<li ver="2" ts="4/24/2014 12:37:08.51" cmp="Display" evt="Profile" mth="OfficeAdapters.AdapterDisplay.RenderReportXMLToExcelGrid.RestructuredRowDisplay" id="e5f43fa96ac44ad49ec0ded087f92cd7">Display time for report 'Renewals Ship to Exceptions': Load XML: 0 secs, Evaluate Styles: 109.69 secs, Evaluate Row Headers: 0 secs, Display Row Headers: 0.04 secs, Display Data: 0.02 secs</li>
Note that in the above log entry, the "Evaluate Styles" process takes 109.69 seconds - an unnaturally long amount of time.
ACTION
This issue can be simply resolved by deleting duplicate or unused cell styles from the Excel workbook. This can be done manually via right-clicking each style and deleting it, as seen below:
If a large number of cell styles need to be deleted, and the manual method does not seem viable, it may be possible to accomplish a mass delete via a VBA macro. However, Strategy Technical Support does not provide this script; the user should seek further information from Microsoft technical support.
