3 problems with excel 2008 and snow leopard

[combi]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Hi there,

I'm using Excel 2008 (12.2.1) with two different macbooks. Since installing Snow Leopard (10.6.1) i've on both macbooks problems with excel 2008.

Problem 1) Excel is so slow, you can't even work with it. When jumping from one field at the end of the page to one of the next page you have to wait 10 to 15 seconds. The same when scrolling with the scroll bar and when writing in fields. When changing the view from "Seitenlayout" to "Standard" everything in as fast as it should be. I've tried to "repair" fonts and to delete some library files - nothing worked.

Problem 2) On my second notebook it's possible to open a sheet on the network - but it's not possible to save the sheet - under the same or another name.

Problem 3) When copying roundabout 40 rows with 20 collums in a second excel-page I get the message "not enoug memory".

If you need to use Excel - what would you tell a company? Oh sorry, use windows 7 on your macs ;-)

Regards
Manfred

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Manfred;

I'm not sure we can help much here with problem #2 ‹ it sounds like a
network configuration issue which will have to be analyzed & corrected
locally. Apparently that system is not being granted write permissions on
the network share.

As for problems #1 & #3, you don't mention specific system configuration but
the mere mention of "Macbook" raises a flag. Snow Leopard has a minimum RAM
requirement of 1GB & Office requires another 512MB on top of that. Assuming
there are absolutely no other processes or apps running that's a bare
minimum of 1.5GB which will render minimum performance. Depending on *which*
Macbook model there may very well be a memory shortage... Anything less than
2GB will be noticeable, and all but the more recent models maxed out at 2GB.

Also, many Macbooks shipped with very limited video RAM & shared from the
system RAM which causes less to be available for the system. Your point
about the difference in performance of Page Layout View as opposed to Normal
View suggests that this may be the case here. Page Layout View puts more of
a demand on the graphics capabilities of the system.

As a matter of comparison ‹ although I'm still using Leopard ‹ I run Excel
2008 on a 2.4 GHz Macbook Pro, 4GB & experience neither of the performance
issues you describe regardless of which View... And this is with files
containing ~11,000 rows of data on each of 3 worksheets.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[combi]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the answer;

I already wrote the complete answer, tried to post it - and landed on the mactopia homepage; my answer went anywhere in the depth of internet :-(

So sencond try:

The configuration:
Macbook 13", Coreduo 2,0 GHz, 2 GB RAM
Macbook pro 15", C2D 2,66 GHZ, 4 GB RAM (4 weeks old)

Problem #2: Maybe it's a configuration-problem after upgrading the macbook pro to snow leopard; I'll check this.

Problem #3: I've seen on my macbook pro. With 4 Gig RAM it shouldn't be a problem with snow leopard (and wasn't with 10.5.x).

Problem #1: Occurs on my macbook. Layout view shouldn't be a problem with an empty sheet an 2 Gigs of RAM. I'm not the only one with this problem. Others have created a new user accout - and with this account everthing works fine; and it seems, it's only with the newest office update 12.2.1

More information about #1 see links below:

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10082263&#10082263>

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10106658&#10106658>

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10154355&#10154355>

Regards
Manfred

 

[J_Sewell]

With regards to the speed problem, I am also experiencing this and I have been participating in (yet another) Apple discussions thread at:

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2141508&tstart=0>

Standard re-install, cache/preference file deletions don't help. Simple actions such as scrolling a blank worksheet are very slow and result in increased CPU activity.

Whilst playing around with the Instruments app in XCode, I have found that when scrolling a worksheet, there are multiple read operations being called by CUPS (I have posted some details in the above discussions thread).

I have put a copy of the Instruments trace on my iDisk. The activities recorded were:

00:00 - 00:30 Excel Start up
00:42 - 00.55 Scrolling a blank worksheet, which alone produces slowdown and high CPU use

I have also saved a tiff showing the Instruments window during the scrolling test, which clearly shows the CUPS calls.

These can be seen in the Excel trace folder on my idisk:

<http://idisk.mac.com/jason.sewell-Public?view=web>

Hopefully this info may be of some use in tracing the problem,
Jason

(e-mail address removed)