Excel SLOW Typing Speed

[rjanssen]

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

Typing is very slow after I either open a file from the File Menu - Recent Items list or after I print. Before this it is fine, but after it takes 2 or more seconds for a character to show even if it is just text.

I have tried deleting plist and all startup items but that has not solved the problem. I performed the tests without any other programs running. There is still an HP program that shows it is running in the startupitems list "HP IO and HP Trap Monitor" but I can not find where they are located since they are not in the system library or on my account startup items.

I tested this at Microsofts suggestion on another userid I set up to test and did not have the problem their but that does not help much.

Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions.

Thanks

 

[LARich]

I am having exactly the same problem, and it seemed to start randomly about three weeks ago, after a series of (unknown) system crashes. It takes 2-3 seconds per character to show up on Excel. No problems with other Office products or other applications.

Problem occurs regardless of what else is running. Have reinstalled Office 2008 with no success, and trashed all preference and temporary files.

Any ideas? Is anyone else having this problem?

Thanks.

 

[rjanssen]

I was finally able to solve the probelm on my machine.

I found the the preference files under both the root library and the user library.
library/preferences and userid/library/preferences

So I deleted all plists that related to office and excel in both locations

I also deleted the startupitems in the root library as well, that where the HP IO and HP Trap Monitor" was starting up from.

Now excel works fine and it fixed a few other small bugs as well

hope it works for you too.

 

[psulion]

Wow! I too was all of a sudden having problems with the performance of Excel. Typing in a particular cell was painfully slow; cutting and pasting took forever; the overall usability of the product had ground to a halt.

I am running on a 1.6GHz Macbook Air. I eventually installed Parallels (which I was not planning to do since the MBA is not as powerful as I would prefer for virtualization), Windows Vista and Office 2007. The performance was almost as good as my Windows box!

After I read this post, I checked out the various Library locations referenced by rjanssen. I didn't have anything related to Excel (or Office for that matter) in Library/Preferences, but did have a number of plist entries in ~/Library/Preferences. I removed ONLY com.microsoft.Excel.plist, and my performance was back! That file has since been recreated, but the performance is still there.

As a note, I also ran "plutil" on all of the plist files in ~/Library/Preferences, but all came back "OK".

Hope this helps...

-Gary

 

[spoof spoof]

I also ran into this problem. Thanks Gary, it seems like after deleting the Excel plist, my Excel runs normally again. I don't know what's going on.

 

[psulion]

Another note on the slow performance of Excel. I have discovered a separate situation where I'm experiencing this issue, and it seems unrelated to the com.microsoft.Excel.plist in my ~/Library/Preferences.

I frequently use my machine to connect to a file share in my office, although my Mac is not part of the domain. This is a Windows file share, and I connect with smb://fileshare/directory.

Whenever I am connected to the share, my performance on Excel is horrible. It doesn't matter if I'm accessing a file on the share, or editing one locally. As long as that share is mounted, the performance of Excel suffer. If I just unmount the share, everything returns to normal.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks,

-Gary

 

[Jeff]

Same problem. Deleting excel.plist did not help. I went to Disk
Utility:Verify Disk Permissions: Repair Disk Permissions and voila! All is
well.