QuickView Navigate without data
A few options to consider, both of which revolve around limiting the data that is returned while you build your report:
1) Temporarily set your Entity to E#None. This way there is no data to retrieve and it will allow you to do your positioning before querying for data
2) Alternatively, in your QuickView settings, set your 'Maximum Number of Seconds' (query seconds) to 1. You'll immediately hit the page limit and you'll get control back to continue building your report.
That said, I've never heard of a report taking 4 minutes to refresh. I'd advise against using QuickViews/CubeViews for doing a datadump (in case that is applicable). Also, check that you have the appropriate suppression settings turned on.
Anticipating requests from Management is very hard to do, so I do understand your situation. Just a fyi - getcells will go and retrieve on cell at a time so if you have 100 get cells, excel will contact the data 100 times. A cube view can be faster but as you said yourself there are other factors involved. If we were brainstorming a possible solution, one approach would be to break the data into smaller units. Maybe even using BI or tables in dashboards. You do not have an easy task.
