Excel and Auto-calculation

Revisited a spreadsheet that had worked for months but had now stopped. Instead of taking <2mins to process the data (ODBC/OLE to VBA to pivot tables) it was taking 30mins+.

Turn off auto-calculation - obvious but didn't work, worse than that - it crashed for Excel 97 (plenty of people still using that!).

The trouble with supporting "old" stuff is that people have forgotten about the issues - Excel 2003 is the one people are talking about.

However after some serious trawling it turned out to be a matter of using the ActiveCell.Activate before CalculationMode = XLManual - to get the focus back on the spreadsheet away from the form that was displayed. Who'd ever have thought of activating the active cell?!