sslloooooow Excel 2008.

[john.e.palmer]

Pardon me while I vent.

I’d call Excel 2008 a dog, except that I like dogs. IT’S
EXTRAORDINARILY SLOW.
For example, using the same Excel file at the same location on the
server, the time to open the file is 12 minutes 22 seconds in Excel
2008 and 1 minute 30 seconds in Excel 2004. I can restart Leopard,
open Boot Camp, boot Windows XP, start Excel 2003, go through the
directories to find the file and load the file in 2 minutes and 15
seconds. This is about 5 times faster than simply loading the file in
Excel 2008. (The file opens in about 10 seconds in Excel 2003.)
It takes 10 minutes 35 seconds to recalculate in Excel 2008 and about
the same in Excel 2004. WinExcel 2003 takes about 4 minutes.
And don't get me started on how long a simple chart takes to load.
If I click on a tab with a chart, it takes 35 seconds for the page to
load in Excel 2008 and 0.5 seconds in Excel 2004 and Excel 2003.
Since the file has to be shared with Windows users, it is in *.xls
format. Could this be part of the slowness?
As near as I can see, the only reason to use Excel 2008 is if you
exceed the number of rows or columns that WinExcel 2003 or MacExcel
2004 can handle. To paraphrase my father, Excel 2008 is as worthless
as “certain appendages” on a boar. MS should be ashamed of releasing
such a product.
And yes, I have posted my feelings on the feedback site.

 

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks for the feedback. It's obviously not enjoyable to hear feedback like
this, but we need to hear it. I'd like to focus on the biggest issues first,
and things that we can take action on. You mentioned a file that takes 12
minutes to open in Excel 2008 compared to 1.5 minutes in Excel 2004. Is
there any chance you could share that file with me so I could investigate?
If not, could you at least describe the workbook (how many sheets, how many
rows/columns of datas). Also, we have some known performance issues with
both charts, as you mentioned, and pivot tables. Does the workbook contain
either of those? Looking at a specific file would help us identify the
specific problem. We may already know about the problem, as we're working on
several fixes currently. But it might be something we don't yet know about
and if so we would love to get to the bottom of it. If you can send me a
file, or any other info on this, please send to (e-mail address removed).

Thanks,

Pat

 

[tfrank]

I had this problem too. I posted my reply on a different thread, but
thought it may be applicable here as well. I do not know all the
inner workings of Mac Office nor Windows Server networks, so I may
have not related all of the information to the exact technical
specifications, but I think it is pretty close. Here is what happened
for me:

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 conflict 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 have been the cause of the Excel
latency, so I opened Excel to test by entering data into four cells,
but realized 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 checked 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 in all of my Mac Office
apps are gone and they now perform like lightening (at least compared
to before).

Just a thought for anyone else out there. Since Mac Office apps are
so tightly integrated to each other, to Entourage, and to Identities,
network address conflicts could be the cause of your slow
performance.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I hope this may help someone else out there! It was such a relief to
have my Mac Office working again!

 

[Steve McDonald]

I'm having a similar problem with a workbook that was working fine with Excel
2003. I have a simple macro that inserts a new line at the top of a list and
copies the formulae from the previous line (I'm quite lazy!):

Sub AddRow()
' Macro recorded 23/03/2006 by dvscm
'
Rows("3:3").Select
Selection.Copy
Selection.Insert Shift:=xlDown
Application.CutCopyMode = False
Range("A3:E3,l3:m3").Select
Selection.ClearContents
Range("A3").Select
End Sub


Now that I'm using Excel 2007, this simple operation takes 17 seconds to
complete. It appears that the insert row takes all the time, even though the
data only covers the range A1:M92 - not exactly a large amount.

Can you suggest anything that I can do to speed this up as I've had to
resort to anything other than Excel (eg paper and pen!)?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

On 5/19/08 10:14 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Steve McDonald" <Steve

I'm having a similar problem with a workbook that was working fine with Excel
2003. I have a simple macro that inserts a new line at the top of a list and
copies the formulae from the previous line (I'm quite lazy!):

Sub AddRow()
' Macro recorded 23/03/2006 by dvscm
'
Rows("3:3").Select
Selection.Copy
Selection.Insert Shift:=xlDown
Application.CutCopyMode = False
Range("A3:E3,l3:m3").Select
Selection.ClearContents
Range("A3").Select
End Sub


Now that I'm using Excel 2007, this simple operation takes 17 seconds to
complete. It appears that the insert row takes all the time, even though the
data only covers the range A1:M92 - not exactly a large amount.

Can you suggest anything that I can do to speed this up as I've had to
resort to anything other than Excel (eg paper and pen!)?

Thanks,

Steve

Well you called it Excel 2008 which is a Macintosh version. I think you
really mean Excel 2007. I'd try a few things. 1)If you can avoid it NEVER
select anything in VBA. And 2) Turn off screen refresh. Your macro ought to
look like:

Sub AddRow()
' Macro recorded 23/03/2006 by dvscm
' and modified by bob Greenblatt
Application.screenupdating=false
with Rows("3:3")
.copy
.Insert shift:=xldown
end with
Range("A3:E3,l3:m3").clearcontents
Range("A3").Select
End Sub

See if this makes any difference.

 

[Steve McDonald]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the info.

You're right about the version of Excel - I noticed that this thread falls
under the scope of Mac Excel after I'd posted it.

I sometimes do things in the way you suggest but didn't realise it made such
a difference. I'll give it a go in the morning and will definitely bear it in
mind in future if it speeds things up a bit.

Thanks again,

Steve

 

[ric49]

I have the same problems with the new Excel 2008: I am working with a large workbook containing both data and graphs, in particular the graphs are generated from more than 10000 rows. Each graph takes more than a minute to view and any change in the graph requires a lot of seconds. With Excel 2004 they were generated quite fast without any slowing down during changes in the graph. My iMac is a 2,33 Ghz intel core 2 Duo and has 3 Gb Ram.