scrolling speed excel with filters

A request for an example workbook is valid. There could be something specific to a particular file that can cause problems. Opening the same file on different machines can help sort things out as to whether or not certain hardware combinations are involved. When everyone starts off with the same baseline (in this instance, the same file) then valid comparisons can be made. Adding additional layers of abstraction adds more variables to contend with.

Same problem here. I've had this problem since I switched to a Mac last year 2012. Cesar's given a great way to generate an Excel file that has this problem, so the point of not having a Sample excel workbook to use for bug fixing isn't valid.

1. Populate cells A1:P10000 with the following formula:  =TRUNC(RAND()*100+1)
2. Select Columns A:P and click on the filter icon
3. Proceed to apply several filters, for example:

  a) F>25

  b) M<85

  c) B=19,35,47,66,89   (Pick any group of 5 numbers)

Hope someone is listening.

Not having a copy of a workbook that exhibits the problem makes it impossible to help you troubleshoot it.

I have the same problem.. and have it on various hardware from a mba 8GB through to my iMac i7 3.4 with 16GB of ram.

The sheet only has about 500 rows with maybe 50 columns...

If I need to work fast I switch to parallels on the same machine and everything is smooth and fast.. so its not a hardware problem.. with parallels running the pc has let resources but excel is faster..

Come on microsoft.. fix this.. please...

It has been explained multiple times that changing the format of the file doesn't help. As pointed out, any explanation requiring the file format to be changed, the data to be modified into a table... fails to address the simple fact that everything works just fine on Windows. This is and continues to be an Excel 2011 MAC problem and not a user's file problem. No released update has fixed these issues.

In addition, there is no need to send any example files to Microsoft as a step by step process to reproduce the problem with random data has been provided multiple times.

Here it is again:

1. Populate cells A1:P10000 with the following formula:  =TRUNC(RAND()*100+1)
2. Select Columns A:P and click on the filter icon
3. Proceed to apply several filters, for example:

  a) F>25

  b) M<85

  c) B=19,35,47,66,89   (Pick any group of 5 numbers)

The entire data/filtering function in Excel 2011 for MAC is terribly broken. There are other threads of issues relating to the way filters are applied... i.e, GUI hangs when a filter checkbox is checked while the program attempts to filter the results... instead of allowing the user to select their filtering options which may include multiple boxes and then click apply. This is common UI best practices.

Finally, try one of the suggestions XinXin made and see the spreadsheet become even more unresponsive... convert the range to a table and then apply the filters. Spinning Ball anyone?

Ah - you want Microsoft to fix a problem but you won't let them see it and you won't let them know whether or not their suggestions helped. I'm afraid that sort of stance will only guarantee that the problem will never be solved. Microsoft engineers are smart, but they are not clairvoyant.

If you look at the date the question was asked you will discover the problem was reported on November 3, 2011.

XinXIn, the Excel product manager at the time, acknowledged the problem on November 6, 2011.

XinXin requested that people affected send him example workbooks. It appears that Burhan Nazir was able to provide XinXIn with an example workbook, and Burhan reoplied in this Q&A with XinXIn's results on February 11, 2012. Apparently in Burhan Nazir's case, converting the data range to an Excel table fixed the problem.

Since early 2011 much has changed. Product updates for Office and Mac OS X have been released. XinXin moved into a new position and is no longer head of Excel development. Sending XinXin your workbooks now won't help.

There are many causation variables that remain to be explored, and example workbooks are required to explore them.  Example workbooks should not contain personal information or private data. Place your example files in a public directory on SkyDrive or your favorite file sharing service, and then put a link to those files in a reply to this message.

Keep in mind this is a forum of Excel users, not Microsoft employees. The MVPs don't work for Microsoft, but we do have a way to get example files to the Excel team.

Before providing an example workbook, please be sure that the file is in a current file format and that it exhibits the problem in Excel version 14.3.5 on a fully up-to-date edition of Mac OS X. By providing example files for other users to experiment with all of us users can see what happens on a variety of different hardware configurations on each others real-world Macs.