Excel Mac very slow (not Windows)

[rick press]

I'm working with a rather large spreadsheet (5mb) created in Excel for
Windows. Same file on my G4 Mac is painfully slow in executing simple
"filters", while exact same task is executed in milliseconds on a 5 yr
old Pentium Windows machine. This is not a memory or processor
problem, so why so slow on a presumably "better" machine?

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

I'm working with a rather large spreadsheet (5mb) created in Excel for
Windows. Same file on my G4 Mac is painfully slow in executing simple
"filters", while exact same task is executed in milliseconds on a 5 yr
old Pentium Windows machine. This is not a memory or processor
problem, so why so slow on a presumably "better" machine?

Well, maybe it is a memory or processor problem. What version of Excel are
you using? What version of OS? What kind of simple filters?

In general, Excel tends to be somewhat slower on the Macintosh, but usually
not dramatically so.

 

[RonCo]

Why is Excel slower on Macintosh - I thought it would be the exac
opposite

Ro

 

[RonCo]

Why is Excel slower on Macintosh? I thought it would be the exac
opposite

Ro

 

[ExcelForums.com - RonCo]

Sorry - nevermin

 

[Wayne]

The Macintosh version is very, very, very, much SLOWER!!!

My key spreadsheet has only been put together on a Macintosh. It's
2.3MB with 46 tabbed pages.

I'm using Office X with all the upgrades on an OS X 10.3.5 G4 with
dual 1.25 GHz cpu's and 1GB memory. Yet I stare at the beach ball
when doing even the simplest tasks. A colleague has Office 2004 on his
Mac that is identical to mine. We tried my excel file on his
computer, but there was no significant increase in speed!

However, another colleague has a windoze machine. My excel file runs
very fast on that machine.

The only work-around I've found is to use Excel: Mac 2001 which
requires the system 9 simulation. This is considerably faster than
Office X!

It appears to me that as Macs get faster, Microsoft Office is
"enhanced" to run slower!

Wayne

 

[JE McGimpsey]

It appears to me that as Macs get faster, Microsoft Office is
"enhanced" to run slower!

My experience is that XL01 is generally a bit faster than v.X or 2004,
and that XL04 is a bit faster than v.X. It's also my experience that
XL04 is, especially for large files, slower than WinXL.

Certainly some of this is due to the MacXL calculation engine, though I
don't have any real details. Array-formulae and formulae that involve
multiple sheets seem to be the worst. OTOH, there are tests that have
shown XL04 is faster with some statistical functions than WinXL.

But some of it is due to OS X. As a preempting multitasking system, it's
still, IMO, not tuned adequately. I can rarely get XL's %CPU up above
70% when I'm running my usual apps (and it's far worse if Word v.X and
Entourage v.X are running - they don't give up much. 04 is almost an
order of magnitude better). I've got Excel reniced to -20, which helps
some - in fact, with other apps closed and XL reniced, my XL04 is often
faster than XL01.

The techniques here can increase performance dramatically for some
models, depending on what formulae you're using:

http://www.decisionmodels.com/optspeed.htm

 

[Jason Morse]

I've got Excel reniced to -20, which helps
some - in fact, with other apps closed and XL reniced, my XL04 is often
faster than XL01.

Excellent tip! Thank you!
Never used this, but after looking up the 'renice' command, I'll
definitely try tweaking this. Is this setting permanent, or does it
need to be reset after rebooting?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Excellent tip! Thank you!
Never used this, but after looking up the 'renice' command, I'll
definitely try tweaking this. Is this setting permanent, or does it
need to be reset after rebooting?

If you do it via the terminal, you'll need to reset it after reboot.
Alternatively, you could use a script or cron task. A nice GUI app to do
this is Renicer by Northern Softworks:

http://www.northernsoftworks.com/renicer.html