Pls confirm 2007 chart redraw is up to 10 times slower than 2003

[larry godfrey]

I have complex charts, with many data points. The redraw time on my machine
in Excel 2003 (all updates for office and wxp installed) is 2-3 sec, which I
consider extremely slow, so I was looking forward to an new chart engine with
better speed from 2007, but am flabergasted at how slow 2007 is.
Try this...create a line chart, 12 columns of 5000 points each. Put it
imbeded in a worksheet. Tab to another worksheet, tab back, time the redraw.
On my machine (3 ghz, 2gig ram), redraw time is 2-3 sec for all the lines to
show up on the graph. In 2007, it takes a full minute! the graph looks
better (lines are more clear), but wow, this redraw time is crazy! I created
the graph in 2003, pulled it into 2007 and saved it as 2007.xlsm file type.

I also have a graph with ~ 50 5k point lines, of which I hide most of them
at any one time. This chart redraw in 2007 can go on for 5 minutes!
(compared to 10-15 sec in 2003)

Am I unaware of some setting to speed things up, or did MS realy make charts
10X slower to redraw?
Best regards
Larry

 

[Mike Middleton]

Larry -

Keep in mind that you are not using Excel 2007. Unless you have been able to
time-transport yourself into the future, you are actually using Excel 2007
Beta 2. And you should not expect that a Beta version is optimized for
speed.

- Mike
www.mikemiddleton.com

 

[larry godfrey]

Sorry for being too casual about the beta part...
However, I would not expect optimization for speed to handle a 10X slow down.
I have run some additional tests using VBA for sheet calculations. If I
calculate a singele row in a complex sheet inside vba, it takes 15! times
longer in the 2007 beta vs 2003.

The only time I see 2007 beta any better in speed compared to 2003 is in a
workbook where 2003 dependency limit has been exceeded so 2003 has to do a
full recalc while 2007 beta only does a "changed" recalc.

Has anyone else done some speed tests?

Best Regards
Larry

 

[Jon Peltier]

It's not just optimization. If you've used the various charting and graphics
modules much in 2007 Beta 2, you will have noticed that a lot of things are
still a bit off. It's a combination of correcting the glitches, optimizing
the internal processes, and who knows what else, that will improve the
performance of the program.

- Jon

 

[larry godfrey]

Scott Rubble of microsoft was able to recreate my slow graphing with beta 2,
but has encouraging comments regarding optimization process: "With our recent
performance improvements in charting, it renders much faster than in Beta 2.
The upcoming release of Beta 2 TR should be a good indication of the actual
performance you will see at RTM."
So I am in "wait and see" mode! )
Heeeeres hoping!
Larry

 

[Nick Hodge]

David

RTM charting is a 'little' better, but very much still to be improved (I am
sure in v.next). Quoting the 1000000 rows (You didn't mention 16k columns)
is something I believe Excel users, for it is they who demanded them, will
rue the day they did. It's a limitation of current machine power (Generally
available) and the tasks Excel is put to that make me very sceptical.

Anything approaching the old limit of 65k, should IMHO, be in a database.

Charting *will* get improved but is disappointing in this version.

1,000,000 rows with VLOOKUPs, SUMIFs, etc, I say...

Be careful what you ask for.... (Not you specifically, just a sentiment)

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
www.nickhodge.co.uk

 

[Matthew Cavagnaro]

Users of beta versions of Vista were appalled by the sluggishness of
the entire system... these builds were built for debugging. The RTM
version surprised many people with its speed, even on lower end
systems. I would expect the same to be true of Excel, if not most
software Microsoft produces. Read: Wait until the RTM before you're
ready to judge the speed of the product.

 

[Matthew Cavagnaro]

Er, nevermind. I didn't realize it had already been released to
retail.

 

[Nick Hodge]

David

I was not defending the speed, far from it. The charting in this release
has undergone radical change and was not 'fully cooked' when a line had to
be drawn in the sand to release it. I suspect service packs will address
some major issues, but the real 'upgrade' will probably happen in v.next

Memory usage has gradually been improved over versions where more of the
'pool' can be used and 2007 is no different here. 2007 is also the first
version to allow multi-threaded calculations using multiple processors.

VLOOKUP does not have to be sorted if you need an exact match, just use
FALSE as the last parameter. This finds only an exact match, irrespective of
sort or returns #N/A

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
www.nickhodge.co.uk

 

[barry]

Finally!! someone else with this problem. I just purchased office enterprise
and found that Excel 2007 is EXTREMELY slow....unuseable for my work! This is
criminal!!

Can I leave the rest of enterprise on and reload my old excel (2003) or do I
need to blow the entire enterprise away and reload my old office version.

This is insane....very poor....microsoft does it again with customer service

 

[Nick Hodge]

Barry

You can load both versions at the same time. You may be better to load them
in version order though. 2003,then 2007. There is an option to keep previous
versions in Office 2007, just be careful you don't skip over it

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
www.nickhodge.co.uk

 

[Bob Flanagan]

Nick, any idea on how to make 2003 the default one when you have both loaded
and click on an xls file?

Bob Flanagan
Macro Systems
http://www.add-ins.com
Productivity add-ins and downloadable books on VB macros for Excel


Bob Flanagan
Macro Systems
http://www.add-ins.com
Productivity add-ins and downloadable books on VB macros for Excel

 

[Nick Hodge]

Bob

Can't test at the minute but try holding down the shift key and
right-clicking an xlS. Then select open with... and don't just select Excel
from the list, take browse and then navigate to the Office 11 folder and
select Excel.exe from there.

Check the always use this program for files of this type checkbox and that
should work.

Let me know if it doesn't and I'll take a look in the registry.

One other thing you may try is to run Detect and Repair (Under Help in 2003)
and then ask it to reset shortcuts in the dialog

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
www.nickhodge.co.uk

 

[Bob Flanagan]

Nick, I found that if I did a /regserver on the Excel 2003 exe that it
changed the default for me. Painful typing in the path...

Bob

 

[Mike Barlow]

Hello

I believe that ANY Office 2007 program that runs slower than Office 2003
on the *same* problem or application is a defacto software downgrade. Some
of these problems may be due to new features that have not been fully
optimized yet, but I regard any new feature that slows down software
execution to be a mistake -- a mistake that should be fixed. Software
slowdown due to larger problem size is natural, but delays due to cosmetic
new-features should not be allowed.

I believe that Office 2007 will not gain wide public acceptance if it is
perceived to be excessively slow as indicated by some of the previous posts
here.

Perhaps more effort should be devoted to optimizing Excel for
math-intensive, high-speed processing of large data arrays.

 

[Steen T.]

Hello

I have just upgraded from Office pro 2003 to 2007 and have exactly the same
experience as mentioned in the above threads in Excel but even worse - my
worksheet calculates a graph from a simple 4 columns by 1200 rows section
with no formulas only numbers - it was working well in 2003. In 2007 it takes
UNBEARABLY longer to the point of being useless !!! . I am using 2.2 GHz AMD
64x2 dual core, 2.0 GB Ram Have I wasted my money on the upgrade? Is there
anything I can do to improve performance or will Microsoft do something about
it ? What happened to the dual processor feature?

 

[Martin Brown]

Hello

I have just upgraded from Office pro 2003 to2007and have exactly the same
experience as mentioned in the above threads inExcelbut even worse - my
worksheet calculates a graph from a simple 4 columns by 1200 rows section
with no formulas only numbers - it was working well in 2003. In2007it takes
UNBEARABLY longer to the point of being useless !!! . I am using 2.2 GHz AMD
64x2 dual core, 2.0 GB Ram Have I wasted my money on the upgrade?

Do you really need to ask?

Is there
anything I can do to improve performance or will Microsoft do something about
it ? What happened to the dual processor feature?

You could beg for the hotfix. That makes it slightly more bearable, or
alternatively if you are in the UK you could try rejecting the product
as not fit for purpose. It is about time somebody took up the cudgels
on this one.

XL2007 was not ready for release and still isn't. It might get better
after SP1 if we are lucky.
Numeric formatting problems with the simple calculation =77.1*850 does
not inspire confidence.

And I have seen a few larger complex graphs where it is quite a bit
more than an order of magnitude slower.

A 10% slowdown to have more rows or columns would be worthwhile, maybe
even 50%. That level of overhead can be absorbed in a hardware upgrade
or by adding extra ram. But what we have here is a 1000% slowdown for
daring to have user defined axis scaling on graphs with modest amounts
of data.

It works OK if all you ever plot is sales figures by quarter. But it
is dead in the water at present for many scientific users with
datasets of a few thousand points which used to work perfectly in
versions 2000 through 2003.
I wish I had your confidence. It seems most users are as dumb as
Microsoft thinks they are.
Some slowdown in the larger more capable model was inevitable, but I
don't believe this particular problem with the graphics is related to
the grid size. It looks more like daft cosmetic display features
trumping functionality.
A polite way of saying almost useless. It would be difficult to make
charting any worse

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Steen T.]

Hello

You are right. If nobody has done anything about the problem since your post
in March - a good 7 months should allow something - I hope my post has added
some fuel to the fire.

 

[Juan M. Russo]

Hello,

We are an R&D facility and we use excel almost all the time to plot scatter
charts (x,y) with 10000+ datapoints and we have the sluggish unberable
performace. I 'begged' for the fix and installed SP1 afterwards and I still
have the same slow performance. Actually I dont notice any difference.

Has there been any improvement in this matter ??

Thanks

Juan

 

[Jon Peltier]

You may have to upgrade to Excel 2003. The Excel 2007 SP1 fixed a limited
number of performance issues, and only by a limited amount.

- Jon