Excel 2008 unusably slow

[Greg_M]

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

Hi, I'm not very hopeful of a solution here but I thought I'd post my experience anyway. We have just spent £10k on Office upgrades, but Excel v12 has proved unusably slow for our finance department. Specifically, opening a typical document will take several minutes, and copying and pasting will cause a recalculation which takes the same time. So we've had to leave v11 installed just so they can work.

After searching this forum (boy do i wish I'd done that before buying!), it appears that I am not alone, although not everyone is having these problems. I guess we will simply have to wait for the MBU to raise this issue to a higher priority level and get an update out to us.

If anyone has a fix though, I'd love to hear it.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Greg;

I honestly don't think it's a matter of not being already at the highest
priority level so much as it is a matter of being able to replicate the
behavior & isolate the cause. MacBU has been concentrating on Excel
performance issues since the release of 2008 & has done much to improve it
by way of updates. Those who continue to have problems are not being ignored
it just seems that each situation is different.

Since he's repeatedly posted his email address here for exactly the same
purpose I'd suggest you directly contact Pat McMillan at MacBU to see if
there are suggestions for remedying your case: (e-mail address removed)

 

[Greg_M]

Hi Bob, thanks for your reply. I'll give your suggestion a shot.

Greg

 

[Greg_M]

I thought I should post a follow up to this as I have been given a solution and I wanted to redress my rather negative initial post.

The very helpful Pat McMillan at MS provided me with the following fix:

"I had a chance to take a look at your file today. The problem is that your defined name "data" is defined as the entire sheet (data!$A:$Z). Since the size of Excel's grid was expanded dramatically in Office 2008, scanning the entire grid when calculating a formula can take a really long time. If you redefine your "data" named range to just encompass the actual range of data used (such as data!$A1:$Z52), then save the file you should find that the file calcs really quickly on subsequent opens. Note that we do think that Excel should be smarter about how it handles this scenario, so we are working for a fix to this that we can hopefully release in a future update."

And thanks to Bob Jones for putting me in contact with Pat. You guys have saved Microsoft's reputation in the eyes of my Finance Director ;-)