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Cancel means Cancel

When a workbook is taking too long to calculate one often tries to Cancel the calculation.  Unfortunately, the cancellation often takes longer than letting the original calculation continue.  This should not be so.  Cancel should mean Cancel.  Upon receiving that command, Jet should abandon all its work and immediately restore the original model from its hidden tabs.

I’m not sure what Jet is doing for so long when it is slow in canceling.  Presumably, it is trying to recreate the hidden tabs that store the cached data.  In such cases, Jet should just abandon the recreation effort and delete the sheets.  If users have to Refresh a workbook rather than being able to use cached data the next time they run it, I believe that would be ok and they would accept it.  The reason they’ve tried to Cancel is that something wasn’t right in the first place.  You could make it an option on Application Settings called “Fast Cancel” if you felt that not all users would want to do it.

  • Guest
  • Mar 31 2018
  • Under Consideration
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  • Gary Winey commented
    16 Jul, 2022 09:33am

    If you go from Run time view to Design View in Jet, you see a little dialog about restoring formulas etc. It usually displays for a few seconds. Presumably, this is what is going on in the background when you cancel a report.

    It seems like Jet could just create a temporary copy of the Jet Report sheet before it starts processing the report. If the report completes successfully, Jet could just delete the temporary copy. If the user clicks Cancel, then just copy the temporary copy created earlier back on top of the Jet Report.

    Agreed it is very painful to have to cancel a large report.

  • Tarek Demiati commented
    20 Mar, 2021 07:45pm

    +100 for this improvement.

    When clicking on Cancel the refresh process time must stop immediatly in a fraction of a second.


    Same issue sometimes when clicking on Design, Jet tries to evaluate the formulas, when all we want to see is all the formulas in design mode immediately.

  • Rob Fontaine commented
    6 Feb, 2020 04:52pm

    Would be great to see an updated on this request, it's been a major pain point with Jet for years.

  • Gabriele Hayden commented
    31 Jan, 2019 10:00pm

    I agree completely. This is a terrible pain, and means that I end up showing users how to crash out of Excel using the task manager, which means they are more likely to lose data (especially if they have other reports open at the same time)