Frustration with Excel 2011!!

This post is more a of a rant I suppose, but maybe someone here has a tip?

I'm an accounting major + I love to use spreadsheets for everything! I don't care for Numbers and would rather take that effort to better learn excel.

However, Excel for Mac is just awful compared to windows. It takes 10-30 seconds to open a blank workbook (I just had to force quit it). And beach balls when you put in the first formula of any sheet. I just put in a basic B5+B5*$A$1 formula and it froze for like 7 seconds. What is sad is that running Excel 2010 or 2013 in Windows via VMWare is much faster than excel for mac, but running a VM slows the rest of my machine down.

2011 MacBook Pro Quad i7, 8 GM of RAM.

Excel for iPad and OneNote for Mac are both a joy for me to use, much more responsive and fluid. I hope that when Excel 2014/2015 comes it makes a huge improvement.

But until then, do any of you know any tips to speed up excel?

No add-ons. I must admit that it got notably slower with mavericks. Unfortunately, some apps and features that I use daily only support Mavericks.

I hope that this is just poor optimization that will be fixed with Office 2014. Since I have the University subscription so I'll get the new version.

Yeah, unfortunately Numbers lacks the functionality I need and the compatible I have to have to work with my business spreadsheets. I don't think Excel should be this slow, but I recently did a fresh install when I purchased the subscription so I don't think that is needed. I suspect that Mavericks and Excel don't play as nice.

I'll just wait it out until Excel 2014/2015 is released.

maflynn said:

Excel is light years ahead of Numbers, I use Excel but I'm not happy with the Mac version. I have an office 365 subscription and what the windows version has over the Mac is enough for me to keep a VM running and using that.

YMMV but I used Numbers for a while, but found it too limiting.

Click to expand...

Yes exactly! And even the functions that Numbers can do I find to be more tedious to implement.

Plus, I need compatibility with Office and Numbers does not open and export complex Excel files well.

I recently replaced my HDD with a Samsung EVO SSD. This helped, but now I can clearly see how lacking MS Office is. Every app on my system opens nearly immediately, but Office still takes about 5-7 seconds. I know this is a first world problem, but Office running in VMWare opens instantly now, so there is no reason Office for Mac shouldn't.

And yes, when I replaced the SSD I did a clean system install and a fresh installation of MS Office, so it is Office, not my computer.