Do any of you Sheets experts know the deal with this progress bar in the top right corner of my Sheets? It seems to be a newer feature and I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to tell me. It seems to be cycling far too often, and slowing Sheet loads(?) as it’s cycling multiple times in succession. It’s cycling even when the Sheet is fully loaded and I haven’t modified any cells. Autosave used to be after keystrokes to my knowledge.
I believe it’s the progress bar showing when your Sheet is calculating something. If the bar isn’t fully loaded then there maybe calculations still not finished somewhere.
It’s not new. It’s been there for as long as I can remember.
I’ve had that. Used to have really heavy calculations in my sheet and it would take several minutes to run through all of the calculations. Have since made a lot of improvements to make my sheet more efficient and moved a lot of the calculations into glide columns. Now I only see the progress bar for a few seconds whenever it’s calculating something.
I did some poking around and some testing…
It seems that some random number generators that I was using on one sheet are updating even when I’m not on that sheet. Why, why??
I guess it was new to me because I hadn’t been using these random number generators before.
I’m trying to use tables as much as possible, that’s for sure! The worst part of using tables is just getting the initial app info typed in - the UX is still cringy at times.
Thanks guys!
Are you using any volatile functions in your formulas? (specifically now(), today(), rand() or randbetween())?
If you are, check how they are recalculated. File → Spreadsheet Settings → Calculation
Thanks for this, I am using rand and randbetween. The setting was “on change and every hour”, I changed it to “on change” and now it’s seemed to settle down, although I’m not sure why that would make the difference. 