Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

Anonymous
2015-10-30T19:44:34+00:00

I upgraded five personal household computers to Windows 10 last week and upgraded my Office 365 subscription to 2016.  Now all five laptops are having major issues running Excel.  Excel is very slow moving between cells and when I copy a large amount of data to new sheet, I have time to play a round of tennis before Excel responds.  Excel is too slow to use anymore.  

I have researched the issue for past 7 days and tried every recommended fix without success.  Apparently a great many users are having similar issues with Excel Office 365 2016.  Preparing to try out Google Docs spreadsheet... anyone using that?

I even brought an old PC out of mothballs with Windows 7 Ultimate but when I installed Office 365 2016 Excel had same slow running issues.  I suspect my Excel problems are in Office 365 2016.  How do I revert back to Office 365 2013? 

I am surprised Microsoft launched Office 365 2016 with this major issue on Excel.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

53 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2018-02-27T04:59:03+00:00

    I'm sorry to hear that you all are encountering these performance issues.  A couple of questions.

    First question: are you experiencing this on all workbooks or just on some?  If on some, are you filtering on that workbook?

    Second question: Are you using the 32 bit or 64 bit version of office?

    Third question: Are you using Win10?  If so you might have a bad video driver which could affect a number of functions within Excel.  To determine if this is indeed the case, please do the following and see if you still encounter the issue:

    1.Boot Microsoft Excel

    2.Click File > Options > Advanced.

    3.Under Display, turn on the "Disable hardware graphics acceleration" check box.

    4.Quit Excel

    5.Re-boot Excel

    If the video driver was the issue you shouldn't see the problem anymore.

    If that does solve the issue, re-enable the setting and then go to the following post to see how to update your driver:

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_2016-word/fixed-11516-excel-word-or-outlook-problems-caused/6305c25e-b855-4621-8936-978f0d5dec91

    Bob Archer

    Microsoft Excel Team

    Bob your a life saver I have tried every option under the sun and none worked Guess what yours did it was the graphics driver slowing every thing down now it is lightning fast I will see if I can get an updated driver from DELL hope I don't have any other problem because I have switch ed it off !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wonderful

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2018-02-13T17:30:12+00:00

    Nothing fancy I'm afraid. I just applied the conditional formatting to a specific range of cells in the relevant columns. For example, I currently have about a thousand rows populated with data in one workbook and instead of applying the formatting to over 100k cells in the whole columns I applied it to the existing populated cells plus a bit more (1200), extending this as necessary as I add more data.

    Maybe not the best solution, but at least I can now use my workbook without having to curse the previous long and unacceptable delays.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2018-02-13T15:25:39+00:00

    So, how did you restrict the conditional formatting if you still needed to apply it to the 3 columns?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2018-02-13T15:18:55+00:00

    What happens to this topic ? Did you got any response ?

    Actually in my case I need to use Excel via the interop library. Am I doomed for this now or do you know if microsoft is fixing this issue also for the interop dll ?

    Best regards

    I have an Office 365 subscription and ran into the same problem of an unacceptable slowing down of Excel. I tried most of the solutions proposed, but to no avail. In the end, I found the problem to have been conditional formatting in the whole of 3 columns (i.e., N:N). Restricting the conditional formatting solved my problem and Excel no longer hangs.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2018-01-24T04:39:16+00:00

    What happens to this topic ? Did you got any response ?

    Actually in my case I need to use Excel via the interop library. Am I doomed for this now or do you know if microsoft is fixing this issue also for the interop dll ?

    Best regards

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments