I've been having issues with the Excel Reader taking minutes or even hours to read certain complex excel files. This has been extremely problematic, because I want to run a daily index on a multi-terabyte project data folder and process new/changed files each night. Often the indexer effectively freezes up when it hits one of these problematic excel files. I have to have a 2nd protocol check each morning, and kill the indexer process if it's still running. I then maintain a list of excel files to ignore. But several times a week my indexer stalls when it finds yet another excel file that can't be read. One solution would be to wrap the excel reader in a subprotocol, and then have that subprotocol throw an error (which I could then capture) if the reading takes more than, say, 30 seconds. But as far as I know, PP does not have the feature of setting a timeout for a subprotocol.

Anyhow, this is all moot, because I have found a solution! To fix the issue, I simply deleted the excel reader and dragged in another one. Then I set my parameters to be the same as before. Instead of taking hours, the file reads in a few seconds. Simply amazing.

My indexer protocol was originally written using a PP 2017 server, and now I'm on PP 2022. So the component added to the protocol has the "2017 settings". What's a real puzzle is that when I drag in a new Excel Reader and compare it to the old one, the GUID is the same. I can find only two differences. Implementation->Shortcut Version is 1 on the 2017 excel reader, and it's 2 on the 2022 excel reader. The only other differences I can see are under the Information tab - Component Local ID & Component Full ID are 0 in the PP 2017 component, and 1 in the PP 2022 component.  

So, if you've got an old protocol running on a new PP server and it's reading excel files really slowly, delete the excel reader and drag in a new one!