hi Okay, so we have more testing, and I wanted to report the results back to this list. Holden Aust saved the file as an .ods file. That .ods file was about 343.5 kb, as opposed to the original 6 mb .xls file. Holden created the .ods version of the file by copying and pasting to a new spreadsheet, and then saving in native .ods format. The saving and opening were both done with OOo 2.2.1 . The opening was done on the actual production machine that the teacher would have been using, specs given above.
Holden was able to get the .xls file down to 1.7 MB with the simple copy-and-paste method and then saving as .xls. With the file under .ods, it opened in about 10 seconds. With the file under .xls at 1.7 mb, it still took about 12 minutes to open. Saving the file from .ods to .xls took about 6 minutes. So unless and until we can get the teachers to all us OOo Calc or (preferably) Base, OOo is not going to be a solution that this new teacher is going to be using any time soon. And since this teacher is going to have to use this file tomorrow morning, it appears that we are temporarily out of luck at this school for swapping Microsoft Excel out for OOo Calc. Now we are going to have to focus on the long term solution of getting a proper file server in here, and either working with this mission-critical file under a browser in Moodle, which I have never seen, but have heard works, or we are going to have to get all of the teachers using OOo. I still have a couple of tweaks to test, such as turning off recalculation on loading. But for right now, it seems as if we are not going to have a solution with FOSS. Someone suggested using Kcalc or Gnumeric, and I am going to try that before giving up the fight for this teacher for tomorrow. I am also going to try to use Adian's tips for opening this file in OOo Base. Thanks to all who replied!
