Why is Excel so slow?

Be careful when copying... if you accidentally select an entire column of cells, that's potentially 65,536 cells that you're copying and pasting; it could take a while to process. Make sure you select only the actual cells that you want to copy, and not an entire column (or columns).

The Find feature could be slow for the same reason... if you've accidentally activated an entire column of cells, then the number of cells that must be searched increases by a huge number. For example, if your sheet goes from A1 to J10, that's 100 cells; if it goes from A1 to J65536, that's 655,360 cells that must be searched.

 

Alert! Don't get a mac! They can't run excel.

lol, anyway, Check to make sure you don't have anything thats constantly trying to update its value from a huge formula or anything.

But really, probally just an issue with the mac version of excel with large files.

 

Unfortunately I have also witnessed the slow-downs you describe (especially with cutting, pasting and deleting cells), and I have no idea what the problem could be. This is using Excel v.X on both my 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook (with 768MB RAM) and my 1.6GHz PowerMac G5 (with 1.25GB RAM). I'm not sure if there's something in particular (like autocorrect) that's turned on that's slowing down the whole thing, but the unfortunate truth is that Microsoft Office runs much more slowly on the Mac than it does on a similarly specced PC. Word even has trouble keeping up with my typing...on a G5

 

woah! are you serious?

 

Yes. It's not like Word drags half a paragraph behind or anything like that, but there are times (my personal theory on this is that Word's Autocorrect misfeature might be to blame) when the text doesn't appear on your document at a speed which you would expect. There is sometimes a small, yet perceptible lag between pressing a key and the text appearing on the document. This is on Word v.X with all the updates applied. It isn't bad enough to interfere with my work (not by a long shot), but like I said...the lag sometimes between striking a key and the letter appearing on screen is enough to easily notice. Microsoft Office on the Mac, while being completely usable (I use it every day), is definitely not as smooth a performer as it is on Windows.

I also find in Keynote 1.1.1 that entering text into text boxes can be a bit laggy also, depending on what other elements are on the slide at the time. Nothing that stops me working...it's just noticeable, and you don't expect a 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook to struggle keeping up with typing

 

Its Micro$h*t what did you expect?

 

Keynote has similar problems. What's your point?

 

I am having exactly the same problems. Nearly new Dual 2.3 and running Office 2004 v.11.1.1.

Trying to cut and paste single cells or even a line slows Excel down and I get the 'stopwatch' busy icon or sometimes even a beachball.

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

 

I find that I have this problem the first time I cut/copy and paste. After that it works perfectly. Not sure why.

I also have found that when you enable the saving of an auto recover file, the saving process takes longer and longer each time it saves even if you aren't adding very much data. I have files sometimes that are about a couple megs and after 5 hours of being open an auto save will take about 30 seconds. Way too long for a small file.

Of course this is a minor annoyance compared to the other problems I have.

Oh, and I'm using the most up to date version of Office.

 

iDisk

Do you have idisk mounted automatically in finder? I was having a lot of problems with slowdowns because of this. Try unmounting and leaving it off and see if it helps. I can replicate this slowdown every time I turn it on.