Why would a spreadsheet cause Excel to stop responding every other minute? No macros, manual calculations

I have a 1MB xlsx Excel spreadsheet which causes Excel to stop responding every other minute or so. Excel never crashes but it becomes unresponsive for a while (10 to 40 seconds). Any ideas what could be causing it?

This is what I have tried / thought of - to no avail:

• There are no external links (Data -> external links is greyed out)
• No macros nor any user-defined function
• I have tried 'open and repair' but the problem persisted; the log said "some parts of this workbook may have been repaired or discarded" which is the most unhelpful message ever - were they or were they not? If yes, which parts?
• There are no data tables and calculation is set to manual anyway.
• I have tried it on two PCs, both quite new and with 16GBs of RAM
• This doesn't happen with any other file
• It happens more frequently than the autosave interval of 10 mins but it happens even if I disable autosave altogether
• It doesn't use any add-ins; I have also disabled every add-in
• It's only 1 MB so it's definitely not a lot of data and the calculations are nothing fancy - mostly sums and multiplications.
• I can't find any errors in the formulas; I had thought maybe something like an xlookup, which my version of Excel doesn't support, was used, but it seems not.

Unfortunately I cannot share the actual file because of confidentiality etc.

I have tried it with Office Professional Plus 2019 - I don't have another version of Office to test it with.

Thanks!

The solution for the poster was to open menu File > Options > Formulas, and then in the section "Calculation options":

• Check "Enable iterative calculation"
• Set "Maximum iterations:" to 1
• Click OK.

My explanation for its working is that the spreadsheet contained cyclic formulas, but that without this setting they were not checked. Setting the maximum to 1 enabled the check for circular calculations, and stopped it after only one extra (too many) calculation.

Try saving the file in an older xls format then resaving it back to newer xlsx or perhaps the binary format .xlsb

Do you use any volatile functions e.g. NOW, RAND, OFFSET or INDIRECT... or perhaps conditional formatting? In theory manual calculations should prevent volatility issues. Does the problem occur regardless of whether you are viewing or editing the file (or even if the workbook is not in focus)? Do you perhaps have other workbooks open?