my excel freeze for even simple things like boldening/italicising cells. why? solution?

i have an excel file i maintain. its a small file, not big, a few kb. but sometimes, when formatting cells, say bolding text or italicising, my excel stops responding and freezes. the cells arent links, they just contain bog standard text of one or two words.

it doesnt happen all the time, but occasionally. but its still annoying.

my own laptop has excel 2021. my work laptop has 365 and sometimes it happens there too, so i think this is some sort of problem with excel generally.

has anyone else experienced this and can advise on a solution? thakns