Need help with performance issues
I’m having trouble with my Google Sheets getting really slow. Every time someone checks a checkbox, I want a date to appear automatically in another cell. Right now I’ve tested two approaches but both make my spreadsheet crawl:
- Using regular formulas - makes everything laggy
- Google Apps Script - also causes major slowdowns
The sheet has gotten so slow that it’s basically unusable now. Is there some other way to make dates show up when boxes get checked that won’t kill the performance? I really need this to work smoothly since multiple people use this sheet daily.
Any suggestions for a faster method would be amazing!
turn off auto calc - go to File > Settings > Calculation and set it to manual. that way, your formulas won’t trigger with each checkbox click. just hit Ctrl+Shift+F9 to refresh when needed. totally fixed the lag for me on project tracking sheets with lots of checkboxes.
Your Google Sheets performance will improve if you restructure the date autofill setup. Try ARRAYFORMULA with IF statements - it’s way faster because it processes all data at once instead of row by row. Avoid NOW() or TODAY() functions since they slow everything down. Keep your formula ranges tight and only reference the data you actually need. If you’re using Apps Script, set up triggers that only fire when the relevant checkbox cells change. No point running calculations when nothing important has changed.
Try conditional formatting with manual timestamps instead of real-time automation. I hit the same performance issues with a team tracker - checkboxes triggering simple static timestamps worked way better than dynamic formulas. Set up a script that runs once daily to clean up or batch process dates instead of firing on every change. Another thing that helped me was splitting data across smaller sheets and using IMPORTRANGE to pull everything into a summary view. The trick is reducing calculation load on your main sheet where people are actually checking boxes.