scrolling speed excel with filters

Joining this thread on Sept 10.  I have this problem on two machines, plenty of Ram, etc etc.  I tried all of the recommended fixes and also skinnied up my spreadsheet.  Nada.  Filtering is just fundamentally buggy.  I suspect Microsoft is well aware of this issue and the problem is so deep in Excel code they really can't do anything about it, so have decided to say nothing.  Filtering works fine on Apache Open Office, so that will be my solution for the foreseeable future, suboptimal but ok for now.  If someone else figures it out, would love to know about it.  it's a real pain to not be able to use this feature.

That's good detective work. Thank you!!!!!

Ruling out memory leaves only one source of trouble: Excel itself. 

About the only thing we can do about that is to complain to Microsoft by sending feedback. Anyone can do this by displaying the suggestion form using Excel's Help menu and choosing Send Feedback. A polite but firm suggestion that Microsoft fix this problem would be appropriate.

For those having Microsoft support incidents, use one of them. 

This issue appears to affect many users. The question has 2,454 views already, and from the comments here the effect on usability is substantial and painful. 

If you are affected, please let Microsoft know how this problem negatively affects your ability to use Excel for the Mac.

I would be curious for those affected if someone would compare speed results in LibreOffice 4 (latest version) and the Excel web application at OneDrive.com.

So sorry to check out of this thread for ... two weeks ... vacation.

Re Jim's suggestion that 16 GB RAM would resolve slow Excel scrolling on a Mac, I found a colleague with a 16GB MacBook Pro with whom I could share my 65000 line spreadsheet (I cannot share with Jim as the data is sensitive).  I asked Brandon to open the spreadsheet and scroll, then filter two columns and scroll. Specifically he filtered a list of 400 distinct college classes for "Math" and "A, A-, B+, B." This selected about 1500 of the 65000 records.

Brandon even took a video of the process but I cannot share it because (of course) you can read  students names, grades, and DOBs (Dah).  Brandon stated the worksheet "scrolled really slow with the filters applied."

Below find an image of the Activity Log for the 16 GB RAM laptop running filtered Excel spreadsheet.

So, Jim, memory does not seem to be the issue.  Anything else you would like tested?

Cynthia Grua

Utah System of Higher Education

Office of the Commissioner

Out of my 8 gigs I’ve already used up 7.52 gb and I’ve barely got anything going on.

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Sorry, but your statement is misleading. YOU are only using a small amount. A computer would be a waste of money if it did not use up all RAM. In your case the operating system is optimising itself by utilising free RAM for File Cache (3.94GB) and other purposes since it's otherwise not needed by applications. This memory is considered free for application usage.

Look at App Memory, that's your usage, a small 2.37 GB of 8 GB. And seriously, learn how computers work. RAM exhaustion slows down an entire machine, less so on Mac due to compression techniques that activate before swapping, and SSD in fact makes swap relatively efficient memory.

I'm a senior systems analyst with this problem, tasked with large scale system design and software optimisation. The MVP responses in this topic to date are completely surprising and in some cases embarassing. As mentioned before a reproduction case is already provided. Give a developer a reproduction case like this and the issue is solved. In my experience the issue here is simply the right information getting to the wrong people whose lack of experience discards it, and in an attempt to be helpful they instead cause frustration and annoyance.

It is simply unfortunate this thread has reached where it is. I'll be abandoning all hope of a fix and removing notifications from this thread. I dare say it has been entertaining and I do appreciate the thought and intention of MVP posts is good, but unfortunately this issue is clearly above them.

Thanks for trying.

OK - So you're saying that running out of RAM won't slow things down? That video RAM and speed is not relevant to speed issues? 

What I am saying is first rule out hardware constraints. Try with a single file for a real world example on identical machines (except for RAM). 

The balance in speed difference between Mac and PC is due to lack of optimization of Excel on the Mac. 

1. For SOME people in this thread, RAM  and processor constraints are the likely cause of the slowdown. Upgrading hardware will fix the problem if that is the cause.
2. For OTHER people in this thread, the lack of optimization of Excel is the culprit. There's nothing we can do about that except complain or use Excel for Windows.

I can't tell you which individuals will fall into either category. I'm trying to provide troubleshooting suggestions. The folks who fall into the second category where Excel for Mac is too slow, I suggest using Excel for Windows via Boot Camp or Parallels 10. Depending on the price of hardware upgrades, the Boot Camp or Parallels option may be better.

It's been how many YEARS now since this thread started?! 

Ive given up hope that this issue would be a) acknowledged b) fixed within the existing Office for Mac as an update, without requiring me to purchase the next incarnation of Office for Mac only to find this issue not resolved

sorry, it's absolutely Bulls*** that it has taken this long with only the usual responses being a) get more RAM or b) blaming the machine's spec.