Here's the thing about your spreadsheet crashing in VR: it's not a mystery, it's a clue. You've built a custom TTRPG ruleset that lives in Excel, you've got it floating around your virtual space, and you're wondering why the workbook suddenly becomes unstable the moment you put on a headset. The answer isn't in the spreadsheet itself, it's in the environment you've chosen to run it in. Your workbook isn't broken because of a bad formula or a rogue script. It's breaking because you're asking a tool designed for a flat, static screen to perform inside a real-time, resource-hungry virtual environment. That mismatch is the real issue, and until you treat it as such, you'll keep chasing ghosts.
What you're experiencing is a classic case of external pressure exposing internal fragility. The workbook that works fine outside of VR is still the same workbook inside, but the conditions aren't. VR rendering, especially through apps like Virtual Desktop or SteamVR, demands continuous GPU and CPU resources. That doesn't just affect your game; it affects every application you have open, including Excel. The crash pattern you describe, delayed, intermittent, and tied to interaction, points to a system-level bottleneck, not a spreadsheet logic error. The fact that your changes are saved up to the crash suggests Excel is trying to write to disk under load, but the system can't keep up, so it hangs. Deleting data validation rules won't fix that, because the problem isn't the rule itself, it's the context in which the file is being processed.
Here's what this means for you in practical terms: you need to separate your data from the environment that's destabilizing it. The real fix is to stop running your character sheets as a live Excel workbook inside VR. Instead, treat Excel as a source of truth, not a real-time display. Export the data you need to view or interact with into a lighter format, like a static PDF, a text file, or a simple web page, and keep that in your VR space. Use Excel for what it's good at: calculating, storing, and organizing. Don't use it as a dashboard for a virtual tabletop. You're not fighting a bug; you're fighting the wrong tool for the job.
The takeaway is straightforward: your workflow is the problem, not your workbook. You've already proven that Excel can handle your rules and character sheets when it's not competing with a VR headset. So stop forcing it. Build a lightweight viewer for your VR sessions, keep your master workbooks on your desktop, and let the game engine or a simple app handle the floating screens. You'll get your stability back, and you'll stop losing hours to a crash that was never about your data. That's the fix. Go build it.