excel 2007 slow

[jojobold]

Dear all,
I have a problem with Excel 2007. I imported a lot of datapoints, lets say
250.000, and plotted those in nice x,y scatter plots. Unfortunately excel
slows down incredibly, and consumes more than 300MB RAM (and rising). Is this
some bug? (note: installed office 2007 couple of weeks ago on my <1y laptop,
1GB RAM, Centrino, plenty of disk space). Any way to fix it?
Best,
Joris

 

[JLatham]

I'm not going to call it a bug, but it does seem to be an 'issue' with 2007.
I had a similar experience. We pulled in some data to be x-y scatter
charted: 51 graphs with 8800 data points each. Excel 2007 takes around 12
minutes to process and graph the data, Excel 2003 takes under 2 minutes (on a
slower machine even). I had a couple of other issues with graphing in 2007
and put them all into a pile, wrote it all up and passed it on to Microsoft.
I believe my package has been escalated up the line to the charting group for
Excel in-house, but of course I haven't gotten any feedback on any of that at
this time.

I do know that the charting engine was rewritten for 2007, so it's not the
same engine that was used in previous versions.

And yes, once the charts were created in 2007, Excel's responsiveness
dropped to a snail's pace - click a cell and wait one or two seconds for
Excel to acknowledge the selection change. Other programs running were not
affected. Machines used to try to deal with this were an AMD X2 4800+ based
system with 2GB RAM and an Intel E6600 based system, again with 2GB RAM; both
with Windows XP Pro.

 

[James Bugden]

I with it was only slow with 10+ scatter plots. I can't get past three.

Using scatter plots (points only) with seven thousand points, the speed is
so much worse than either 2002 or 2003 that it is completely unusable.

From a new spreadsheet with four columnar series (one for x, four for y)
with 7000 elements:

Charting one series as a scatter plot is slightly slower than 2003 (few
seconds)
Charting two series as a scatter plot is slower than 2003 (few more seconds)
Charting three series as a scatter plot is slower than 2003 (less than a
minute)
Charting four series as a scatter plot appears hung but does eventually work
if left overnight.

Even simply redrawing the screen with the four series chart has taken over
an hour so far and has not finished. It slowly draws the first three series
and then seems to freeze on the fourth. The application appears hung with
100% CPU.

In this state, it is not even possible to get the data recovery dialog and
requires a task kill to exit.

 

[Walt]

Thanx for documenting and submitting this horror show for us. However I would
call it a bug (or at least a problem) rather than an 'issue' as I'm sure many
of us complainers would agree. It seemed like the responses during the beta
period were not taken seriously and low mips and/or mem were often
insinuated. (I have a two-cpu, 2gb system).

I would suggest that the charting group implement some user controls similar
to the formula options. Anything that would prevent imbedded charts from
redrawing would certainly ease our distress.

Please re-post if any progress or workarounds surface. I appreciate the post
mentioning the effects of conditional formatting on this problem.

 

[JLatham]

Walt,
I won't argue your point - I refrained from calling it a 'bug' because, at
least for me, I was able to complete the chart; so it did what I asked for,
it just took half a century to do it and crippled the system once it was done.
Now, during my efforts over the course of a week in trying to deal with the
beast, I did uncover what I consider true bugs and reported those also:
when I tried recording macros to create a chart I ended up recording nothing!
while performing chart 'tweaking' in VB code, the command to disable screen
updating was ignored (no doubt slowing things down again).
I packaged everything up: the 2007 file (2 versions), the 2003 file, the
test data and 5-1/2 pages documenting my results and spelling out how to
duplicate the issues (and the bugs). We can only cross our fingers, eyes,
toes and Ts and hope that we see SP1 for Office 2007 soon, I guess.