Why is excel so slow?

[jc3]

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

Just did a speed test of Excel on Bootcamp vs. Mac Excel 2008. I setup 12,000 rows of data in one excel worksheet, and 12,000 rows of data in another spreadsheet. Then used vlookup to match the two files together. The results:

1. 4 seconds to run, copy and paste values in Bootcamp, Excel 97.
2. 60.1 seconds in Excel 2004 on the Mac.
3. 7 minutes in Excel 2008 on the Mac. Actually takes about 32 seconds to do the vlookup in Excel 2008, then another 6.5 minutes to do the copy and paste values, for the 7 minutes total.

Why? I don't understand why 2004 would be faster? And yes Windows is faster, but why that much faster? Seems crazy to me.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

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

Just did a speed test of Excel on Bootcamp vs. Mac Excel 2008. I setup 12,000
rows of data in one excel worksheet, and 12,000 rows of data in another
spreadsheet. Then used vlookup to match the two files together. The results:

1. 4 seconds to run, copy and paste values in Bootcamp, Excel 97.
2. 60.1 seconds in Excel 2004 on the Mac.
3. 7 minutes in Excel 2008 on the Mac. Actually takes about 32 seconds to do
the vlookup in Excel 2008, then another 6.5 minutes to do the copy and paste
values, for the 7 minutes total.

Why? I don't understand why 2004 would be faster? And yes Windows is faster,
but why that much faster? Seems crazy to me.

Seems crazy to me too. It shouldn't be that much slower. Was this on the
same machine? What is the RAM and hard disk space?
Were both excels (204 and 2008) open at the same time?