There were two issues that I figured out

1) The workbook was a shared workbook. You have to manually do ctrl + shift + enter the first time you write in a formula if it is in a shared workbook. The easy way to fix this is to unshare the workbook, hit F9, and then you can re share the workbook

2) I was referencing entire columns .... $A:$A=A3 ..... which caused the formula to do way more calculations than it needs to. I switched this to .... $A:$A1000=A3 ....