Can Excel and/or other Office Apps take advantage of Dual Core?

J

jkohut

Can Office Apps (specifically Excel and Access) in either Office 2000 or
Office 2003,
take direct advantage of Dual Core processors or are they limited to what XP
can do?

If there is a boost in Office when running CPU intensive apps (Excel,
Access) does anyone have data on how much (I know mileage may very depending
upon application, I am talking about running an computation intensive
Formula/Macro)?

Any detailed information would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeff
 
D

Dian D. Chapman, MVP

I don't know for sure if Office is set to take advantage of this, but
I doubt it. Most apps don't, as that's generally the OS's job. In
fact, you may even notice them to be slower unless you adjust the
affinity to become dedicated to one CPU.

I just went through this same situation with a video processing app
and found it to be become faster and run longer with less processor
heat when I set it to one processor.

I've also been running similar tests with Word while beta testing my
own code and it seems to be faster with one.

Don't know if the new duals coming out next week will be a different
story? You might want to hit the networking or gaming groups where the
gurus in there have more experience with dual processors and pushing
the limits.

Dian D. Chapman, Technical Consultant
Microsoft MVP, MOS Certified
Editor/TechTrax Ezine

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J

jkohut

Thanks, I kind of suspect the same thing your testing indicated. If True, I
think Microsoft really needs to focus on this sort of thing. Office has
gotten a few useful new features of the years, but if necessary better
threading would probably be useful.
Jeff
 
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