Hello, I’ve been using Tiller/Google Sheets since the beginning of this year. Happy camper. I’ve accumulated probably some hundreds of transactions.
Recently I finally managed to import a huge transaction history from mint.com. I’ve added some to my “Transactions” page in tiller, which now has about 12,000 rows. Since then, the “Filling updates” process (41 accounts both before and after importing data from mint.com) has become a lot slower. I’m talking 10 literal minutes as opposed to 1-2 minutes before.
Is there experience with using Tiller with large Transactions logs? Are there ways in which I can optimize the update? Thanks!
The Tiller folks have advised that there is often a slow down as one’s transaction sheet gets larger. I’m not sure there’s much optimization to be done unless your sheets include some particularly complicated sheets that might be slowing things down further. The general advice is, at some point, to make a copy of your sheet, archive it, delete transactions up to a certain date from your active sheet, and carry on.
Make sure you don’t have any blank rows at the bottom of your Transactions sheet. If you do, delete all of them. That’s a known performance hit to have blank rows down there.
Hi @andrei - Tiller actually has a nice feature for this called “Auto Fill”. Navigate to Extensions–>Tiller Money Feeds–>Settings and toggle the Auto Fill button. You can lean more about it at the Learn more… link.
Recently I was doing some experimentation with speed of processing related to a large number of rows in the Transactions sheet, not even with Filling data, but just with performing some formula calculations. And the number of rows, blank or not, seemed to have a large impact on the performance of the sheet. I noticed a significant difference just reducing from about 7000 down to 2000 rows. Even narrowing my calculation to a very limited data range did not help. Removing volatile functions and conditional formatting also did not help. Reducing the rows made a big difference. It probably depends how you use your Transactions sheet and your reporting needs, but you might find it useful to separate some of the older transactions into an Archive Transactions sheet.
@KyleT that looks promising, thanks! I’ll turn it on and see how things go.
Also thanks for the discussion on the row count impact on calculations. I’ll see how reporting gets slowed down, and if there are workarounds I’ll share here.
