The trick with the styles is to not use attribute over rides in your proc.
instead of doing something like this in print, report or tabulate,
var foo / style=[foreground=red];
define a style that does that.
style datared from data/
foreground=red
;
Then in the proc,
var foo /style=datared;
That will keep the styles section of the XML from growing too much.
Style processing is expensive, and in the end the file size is so big that
it can take a while for excel to load. Resaving it after it is loaded will
trim it back down.
Also, I talked to Chevell in tech support, apparently this is a special case that they are having trouble replicating. The tests mentioned here run in less than 2 minutes, so it may be a platform / installation issue that is causing this incredible slowness.