Excel so slow not useable

[engrav]

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

a simple vlookup within same workbook with 10275 rows takes approximately 7 minutes

this is simply too slow to be useable

I have returned to 2004

 

[engrav]

more to the story

in another thread I was advised to change the vlookup table to absolute references and did so

this cut the test time with 2008 from 11 minutes to 1 minute 37 seconds which is quite useable, thank you very much, so will continue with 2008 at the present

it changed the 2004 Rosetta test time from 1:57 to 1:15, so 2004 still squeaked out a slight victory over 2008 which is somewhat disappointing as I had been hoping for quicker speeds in 2008 over 2004 with these large spreadsheets

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

more to the story

in another thread I was advised to change the vlookup table to absolute
references and did so

this cut the test time with 2008 from 11 minutes to 1 minute 37 seconds which
is quite useable, thank you very much, so will continue with 2008 at the
present

it changed the 2004 Rosetta test time from 1:57 to 1:15, so 2004 still
squeaked out a slight victory over 2008 which is somewhat disappointing as I
had been hoping for quicker speeds in 2008 over 2004 with these large
spreadsheets

My guess about the reason for this is that when you reference the entire
column as you originally did, Excel 2004 only needs to resolve 65535
possible references per column, and Excel 2008 needs to resolve over a
million. While Excel should be smart enough to realize that the used area of
the column is much smaller, perhaps the overhead to determine this is
greater in 2008. That's why the time is significantly improved when absolute
references are used. Yes, I would expect it to run faster natively in 2008
vs. Rosetta in 2004. However, the 12 second difference may be attributable
to the additional overhead to manage the larger grid. So, if this is indeed
what is actually happening the additional time is not too unreasonable.

 

[tfrank]

Another suggestion (if you are on a corporate network):

My Mac Office 2008 apps were all so slow, it was impossible to get
work done. Excel was the worst, where it took several seconds per
cell entry with 2-4 pinwheel pauses just to enter a number. An
Entourage message would lag with pinwheel interruptions a dozen times
per paragraph. After fighting it for weeks, I happened to stumble
upon the problem while troubleshooting an unrelated Mac OS issue.

Our old System Administrator did not do the proper housecleaning on
our DNS server, so my assigned IP address for my Mac was also in the
DNS server lookup database of an old computer that was no longer on
the network. So every time any Office app went to reconcile its file
location, the app stalled trying to find the right computer for the IP
address (obviously since the network had two computers assigned to the
same IP address and one was no longer on the network). The latency of
trying to resolve the IP address confusion made the software latent as
well.

I am not an IT guy, but pretty computer literate. I am assuming that
since Entourage uses projects that share files from within the
Entourage GUI, and that these projects can be shared to network
drives, that every Mac Office app needs to know where the files need
to be saved to in case it may be a shared project file on a network
drive. I believe this is why they used "Identities" in Entourage, and
also why you must exit all Mac Office apps in order to switch
identities in Entourage.

Incidentally, here is how we figured it out: I had Mac Console open
watching the log for the unrelated problem. I fixed that problem, but
had left Console open just to be sure that the error did not return.
I thought that this error may had been the cause of the Excel latency,
so I opened Excel to test by entering data into four cells, and
realize that Excel latency problem was still occurring. When I went
to close Console, I noticed four new error log entries logged to Excel
with basically: "computername.domainname.com Microsoft Excel [271]
doClip: empty path". The domain name was recognized as our corporate
domain and the computer name was recognized as an old laptop that was
out of service. Our SysAdmin then check the corporate network DNS
server and discovered that the old laptop and my Mac had the same IP
address. They deleted the old references so that my IP address was
clean, and now all of my latency is gone and the Mac Office apps
perform like lightening (at least compared to before).

Just a thought for anyone else out there. Since Mac Office apps are
so integrated to Identities, network references could be the cause of
your slow performance.