Charting in Excel extremely slow!

[ramman345]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

I haven't seen a solution to this so here goes: I have Office 2k8 on a MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz with 3GB Ram running Leopard. I have the SP1 update installed.

When I go to chart any data, could be something simple could be multiple columns > 500 data pts each, the whole program just slows down and I get the spinning color wheel. Any changes I make take 10-20sec to take effect. And when I paste said charts into MS Word the same thing happens to Word, just scrolling by the charts freezes up the whole thing for a while. Is there some setting somewhere to turn on hardware acceleration? Or something? I thought this was supposed to be faster!

J

 

[Jason89q]

I am having exactly the same problem.
I have a MacBook Pro 2.4 with 4G ram running Leopard. Once the dataset gets a "little bigger" (over 1,000 or so), making a chart is a nightmare. This has been a huge problem and made Excel fundamentally NOT usable.
They have to come up a fix or a patch fast.

 

[ramman345]

Just thought I would add that I updated to the new version today (12.1.1) and there is no change. I do notice that Excel goes to 95.6% CPU anytime I try to do anything with my charts. Just rendering them on file open takes forever.

For comparison, on the same machine I can run Excel 2003 in Parallels (Windows XP) and it is way faster with no problems!

 

[Todd Aton]

Yes, it is true that there is no change to charting performance in 12.1.1. I
completely understand that this is painful. We do have a work item to
address this. I cannot comment on availability of a fix.

Todd Aton
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft makes no warranties, express, implied or statutory, as to the
information in this post.

 

[Peter Liu]

Same problem here!
MBP 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Leopard, Excel 12.1.1.

A workbook(XLSX) I created in Windows that contain a line chart (46 series x 1000 data point per) is all but unusable on my Mac! It beach-balls with every move I make, even resizing the window! In fact every single workbook I'm working with in my project is having the same problem!

The Windows machine that I created the original document with only has a single core 1.73GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM, running XP. It works just fine in creating and manipulating the document while running other applications (DAQ) in the background!

 

[realdiver]

I've been complaining about this issue since the release came out. I have sent files to MS who agree there is a problem. We are now on version 12.1.1. How long does it take to produce a fix for such a catastrophic problem such as this?

Steve

 

[Pat McMillan]

We're not ignoring feedback on chart performance, but it's true that we
haven't yet been able to make any major changes in that area since we first
released. Unfortunately, changes in charting aren't as easy to make as it
might seem. We're also weighing time invested in one area against time
invested in others.

Thanks,

Pat

 

[ramman345]

Pat, I understand that it takes a while to work through all the issues - and that they have to be prioritized. This excel issue is important because it propagates over into the other MS products. I have a 130 page dissertation in MS Word that I can work with just fine - EXCEPT for the pages with charts pasted from Excel. Scrolling through the document all of the graphics load, etc on pace until you hit the charts. Then the scrolling hits a brick wall and stops for up to 30 sec.

Comeon guys, take care of this stuff.

 

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks. I appreciate your feedback, and understand the pain this is causing.
If you could contact me directly with more details of your specific scenario
(types of charts, size of data sets, etc.) it would be helpful. Believe it
or not, we do use reports from customers like yourself (often right off of
this newsgroup) to help us evaluate the priority of fixes/improvements, so
your scenarios are really valuable.

Thanks,

Pat McMillan
(e-mail address removed)