Finally nailed the annoying Excel 2007 slowdown

I have been dogged by massively slow performance in Excel 2007 on and off since I installed it on Vista running as a VM on my MacBook when they were both released. When I installed XP instead I was delighted to find that performance of Excel 2007 improved massively; I put this down to XP.

Recently I have had the same slowdowns and now I have fixed them, I hope, I realise Vista may not have been entirely to blame for the slowdowns in Excel. It turns out that if you have an unavailable printer set as the default printer in Windows Excel is trying to contact it more often than one would expect (or seems sensible). By making my default printer the VMWare printer (as it would have been when I first installed XP) I have returned Excel to its previously zippy state. Hurrah!