2011 Excel Painfully Slow

[paulrbeers]

This is simply a rant. I have to use Excel for the Visual Basic Editor and I must say it is painfully slow when working with large spreadsheets on my Mac Mini (or any of my Mac's). Apparently it is not multi-threaded and working with 10,000+ row spreadsheets with custom Macros really bogs down. I'm trying to decide if I should buy a faster Mini (i.e. the 2.7ghz mini) or switch to Windows for all my Excel needs (since Windows version is multi-threaded). Ho hum....

[miles01110]

Switch to Windows.

[pfquigley]

Go to Windows. It is Bill Gates way of saying hello to Steve Jobs.

Currently using a imac 27" with 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 - 16 MB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory with with 250 GB Flash drive and using EXCEL is slow.


You might try hitting the ESC at a point where you think it should be done. Doing this sometimes causes the computer to stop feeling like it is hanging and return you the changes you want; completely unscientific.

[James Craner]

Excel 2011 is much quicker than Excel 2008 for Mac, but it is still way slower than the Windows version of Excel with large complicated spreadsheets. As others have suggested your best option is to use the Windows version. Hopefully in the next version Microsoft will add a few more hamsters to wheel inside the spreadsheet engine.

[Benjamin99]

Would running Excel in Windows on a dual boot on the mac net increased speeds over running the mac version of Office? I have the same issue w/ trying to cross process data between several spreadsheets w/ over 10,000 lines each..

[miz-mdk]

Originally Posted by pfquigley

Go to Windows. It is Bill Gates way of saying hello to Steve Jobs.

Currently using a imac 27" with 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 - 16 MB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory with with 250 GB Flash drive and using EXCEL is slow.


You might try hitting the ESC at a point where you think it should be done. Doing this sometimes causes the computer to stop feeling like it is hanging and return you the changes you want; completely unscientific.

I have the mid-2011 Macbook Air 11", 256 GB SSD, which came loaded with Lion (now v. 10.7.2), 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3. Normally very fast, but not with MS Office programs.

My uses of excel are relatively small and rudimentary, but I still find the Mac 2011 version very slow and frustrating. I had a spreadsheet with 600+ rows and 10-15 columns, 5-6 sheets, it couldn't handle it. I have had to copy some of the sheets to new workbooks and make sure I only had one or 2 sheets with all the rows in each one. Of course, being relatively ignorant, I may have done something that got it all upset.

I also notice in Word 2011 the same annoying little lag in editing that I had in NeoOffice - like it's translating from the Windows language to the Mac language. I click to insert something and then have to pause a little before I start typing. Sometimes I have to click 2 or 3 times, or maybe I'm just not waiting long enough for it to figure out that I want to do something there. It seems like Microsoft has managed to make the normally responsive and accurate Mac touchpad act like temperamental Windows touchpads when you're using MS programs.

It's hard to believe that Microsoft isn't deliberately making the Mac versions of their programs inferior. Can they really not get the basics right?

Anyway, thanks for the tip re the ESC button.

[Planky]

Originally Posted by Benjamin99

Would running Excel in Windows on a dual boot on the mac net increased speeds over running the mac version of Office? I have the same issue w/ trying to cross process data between several spreadsheets w/ over 10,000 lines each..

I find excel (latest version) on my mac painfully slow with my large multi sheet spreadsheet. It can take over 30 seconds to respond to any mouse click or button press.

I run parallels 7 with XP. I installed Office on that and there is no slowdown or hangs at all with exactly the same spreadsheet!

Edit:
Just timed it.
From double click on mac excel spreadsheet to available: 59.6 seconds!
Launch Parallels 7: 7 seconds.
from double click on PC excel spreadsheet to available: 7.1 seconds.

So it is quicker for me to launch Parallels then PC excel than use Mac excel. Sigh.

[lilgto64]

I am running into the same sort of thing.

Macros on the Windows version of Word and Excel run almost too fast to measure - same macro on Mac version takes 30 seconds or more.

Which doesn't sound like a lot - but I have run the word macro on something like 60,000 files over the past decade - which adds up. And it may actually be double that - since I sometimes run it - then find I need to change the source file and then have to run it again on the same file.

It would be nice if it was fast enough to set it up to run based on an automated folder trigger.

I have started looking into my code to see if there are places where perhaps better code - with fewer loops etc - can improve the speed - ut I suspect a large chunk of it is on MS to solve.

[kyjaotkb]

Crazy to realize Office is still slow on a mac in 2011 - remember MS Office existed on the Mac even before Windows came out...

[GGJstudios]

Fonts could be a contributing factor to slow performance of MS Office apps. Open Font Book (in your /Applications folder) and click Edit > Resolve Duplicates. If that doesn't help, select all fonts and click File > Validate Fonts. That should tell you if you have any corrupt fonts, which should be deleted or disabled.

For more information:

Font Management in OS X
Mac 101: Font Book
OS X Lion: Fonts list

Also, this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X

[jessec3]

Just purchased new 27' iMac and Office 11. Excell was very slow, so I added an additional 8GB ram. Still no help. It's so slow, I'm having to do my Excel work on my PC. Also, this version of Excel is very stripped down from the PC 2010 version. I'm very disappointed. I'm trying to find an authorized shop to install an SSD, but no one does it in the Salem, OR area. I feel your pain and hope a resolution is in the works, I purchases the iMac to work on large spreadsheets.

[martef02]

I have found Excel 2011 performs fine on my Macbook Pro 13" retina or on my Mac Mini 2.5 Ghz except when pasting data.

I have a spreadsheet with over 20,000 rows and when I want to add more data, it can take a very long time before control is returned.

I found that if I paste the data into an editor that has no formatting and then copy and paste it into the spreadsheet, it pastes instantly.

If I paste the same number of rows from another spreadsheet, it is instant as well. It seems to be something with the format of the data.

When it comes to macros, I have not seen any difference in speed between the Mac version or the PC version. They both perform the same. In my case, the macro reads the 20,000+ rows and inserts the extracted data into the appropriate columns. Its fast.

See http://blogs.technet.com/b/the_micro...-in-excel.aspx

[mpilon]

I followed these instructions posted on this thread and there has been a *huge* improvement.

Originally Posted by GGJstudios

Fonts could be a contributing factor to slow performance of MS Office apps. Open Font Book (in your /Applications folder) and click Edit > Resolve Duplicates. If that doesn't help, select all fonts and click File > Validate Fonts. That should tell you if you have any corrupt fonts, which should be deleted or disabled.

For more information:

Font Management in OS X
Mac 101: Font Book
OS X Lion: Fonts list

Also, this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X

[blueroom]

Apples response to slow Excel on OSX was iTunes on Windows.

[Oldmanmac]

I think the person who said it was Bill Gates' present to Steve Jobs is correct.
With people going back to Win7/XP that just validates MS. If people quite buying Mac Office I think MS would have to move it (speed wise) or lose it.

My $.02