Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

"...makes only milliseconds of difference with one call, but in those cases where code runs, protecting and unprotecting many sheets, it all adds up to a terrible performance issue. 

Because it is considered a security risk to modify that, all request for a change have been turned down. The development team will never do anything to make Office less secure."

What's the point of secure if MS has rendered Excel useless for real work and transformed it into just a pretty way to show tables and graphs? We already have PowerPoint for that sort of thing.

Excel is so widespread that it is conceivable it's impacting productivity nationally, something the Fed and economists are starting to worry about.

I have actually been in touch with Microsoft support about this issue, and they have got some way in finding the issue. It turns out to be a call to some Office interoperability DLL (I can't recall the name) that keeps timing out after a few seconds. They are still trying to find the particular function(s) in my spreadsheet that are triggering this call to the DLL, but I will try to remember to post a reply here once they find the offending function(s).

Excel 2016 is a dog. An xlsm workbook I use runs great in Excel 2010. It constantly pauses and hiccups in Excel 2016/Office 365. It was so bad I reinstalled 2010 on my home computer to avoid the frustrations of trying to use Excel 2016. What a disappointment! I have a Skylake i7 6700K, 16GB of RAM and a Samsung NVME SSD drive for C: - obviously not an underpowered machine.

I'm going crazy with this issue.

Crashing and slowness.  I hate to go back to Win8 and Excel 2013 but, I might not have a choice.

We resolved some crashing by using Wifi.

Testing something I just read about Cortana device history being enabled.

Hey Rob:

I feel your pain. Personally, I still prefer 2010 (actually 2003, but that is dead horse), but that is just me.

The fastest, simplest, cheapest fix for your company may be to upgrade back to 2010 until MS gets off the pot and fixes this problem ...

Talk to your IT help desk. Your company may have a site license that includes direct MS Support. That would give them direct contact with a dedicated MS Support person. That sort of support request will get you better help, faster, directly from MS.

We on this forum, MVP or not, are NOT "Microsoft". Most of us (99%) are unpaid volunteers.  We provide suggestions based on past experience. We do not not have access to MS developers.

Lately (2013, 2016) is seems there has been a lot of "retrograde" improvements, especially performance wise.

Here are some more fixes that have helped others with slow performance (but I doubt they will help you).

Office 2013 Slow - Turn Off Onedrive Sync

<snip>

Perhaps uncheck the “use Office to sync files faster...” setting in Onedrive.

Reference: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_home-office_install/microsoft-office-document-cache-sync-client/6b011698-e0d8-4cc0-b3c2-674ba2565fc3?page=1

I looked at the Settings of the Onedrive desktop application and I saw that the option “Use Office to sync files faster and work on files...” was checked. I unchecked it and everything went normal, my CPU is now under control and there’s no CSISYNCSLIENT.EXE process in the background... Somehow, this started when I used OneNote via Outlook 2013 for the first time.

What this process does is build a very large cache of indexed Office files on your local drive.  For me, the cache was ~5GB, or about equal to the combined size of my Office files.  That would be fine provided I had extra space available on my SSD, but I don’t.     

I discovered that simply turning off this option does not automatically delete the cache and free the space.  To recover the disc space I closed the Onedrive application and then deleted everything in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OfficeFileCache.   Keeping the “Use Office” option turned off has resulted in a much smaller cache. 

MS needs to document the cause/effect of this option so people understand the impact it has on their system.

</snip>

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**Excel 2013 is very slow in Loading Large Encrypted Workbooks**

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/excel-2013-is-very-slow-in-loading-large-workbooks/3dc258b1-0d9b-492c-8ab8-2ba1df26fc7e?msgId=7f92ee0a-4a73-45ce-ac2a-80eb0e0ad1ae

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Anita Oakley \[MSFT\] replied

Hello Jacques,

I just saw this, and I can explain it. In 2013 we went to a more secure algorithm across Office - not just in Excel. Excel 2013 uses SHA-512. It makes only milliseconds of difference with one call, but in those cases where code runs, protecting and unprotecting many sheets, it all adds up to a terrible performance issue.

Because it is considered a security risk to modify that, all request for a change have been turned down. The development team will never do anything to make Office less secure. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/office-2013-known-issues-HA102919019.aspx for an explanation from the development team.

Thanks, Anita

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PS: This site is for asking questions like the one you have raised. But there are very few MS staff who monitor it. On the other hand, MS has setup subsites on the UserVoice forum that have been independently verified to be actively monitored by MS staff, including project managers.  MS looks at that for feature requests and complaints.  Copy your above posting and paste it into a new entry on that forum (include a link back to this question).

• Excel -  https://excel.uservoice.com/

"UserVoice.com" - MS Suggestion box sites

You can use the Office or Windows 10 "feedback" (**)applets but then your suggestions just fall into a black hole. You get no feedback from MS about your feedback.

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A better place to submit this type of feedback the "UserVoice" forum. You can submit suggestions like this to the forum either by "voting" and commenting on a similar existing suggestion or by creating a new suggestion for others to vote and comment on.

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This next link has a longer collection of MS UserVoice.com sites:

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http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_10-desktop/ms-suggestion-box-sites-at-uservoicecom/7397119c-6d48-49e6-8d94-7bd0a50d214f

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Go to UserVoice, either through specific links I’ve provided below or create your own suggestions there. That is where MS is looking specifically for this type of user feedback to bring them back to reality from what-ever lala-land they are working in when they make these "improvements".  Comments (and votes) like these in UserVoice helped to convince MS to roll back the "phat QAT" buttons in 2016 and to at least partially undo the 2016 changes to the way the Pen input works.

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Please do copy the comments you've made here and paste them into comments in UserVoice. If you make a new suggestion, copy the link to your suggestion and post it back on this question so other people with the same problem can vote for it and comment on it. (You’ll get faster action that way.)

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This blog has a picture to show MS really is looking at UserVoice sites:

http://blog.indezine.com/2016/02/powerpoint-feedback-and-uservoice-does.html

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https://www.change.org/p/satya-nadella-microsoft-what-computer-users-want-changed-in-windows-10

• Public petition site

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Here are links to some of my personal “favorite” specific suggestions:

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QAT buttons not showing custom imageshttps://office.uservoice.com/forums/285186-general/suggestions/12512571-qat-buttons-not-showing-custom-images

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Bring back Picture Manger to the Office Bundlehttps://office.uservoice.com/forums/285186-general/suggestions/12498702-bring-picture-manager-back-to-office-bundle

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reinstatement of the option to Pin Folders at:https://word.uservoice.com/

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Bring back all of the old grammar checking rules -https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10009743-bring-back-the-valuable-style-checking-tools-that

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Recently Used List Sort order: Date vs Alpha as of Feb 22, 2016

10 votes https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10137741-recently-used-list-sort-order-date-vs-alpha

144 vote https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10261443-recent-files-pane-in-excel-2013-was-pretty-good-b

Excel Suggestion “Under review” Nov 25, 2015 (wow, fast action)

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Petition to MS President to allow Windows Home users control Windows Updateshttps://www.change.org/p/satya-nadella-microsoft-what-computer-users-want-changed-in-windows-10 (The matching UserVoice site has been discontinued by MS)

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Don’t want Office 2016 tied to Userid -https://office.uservoice.com/forums/285186-general/suggestions/10517283-allow-activation-without-the-need-of-a-ms-mail-acc

Actually there are multiple threads with same point. As of Feb 1 2016 there are 785 votes on this question in multiple suggestions

ALLOW Activation without the need of a MS mail account. 386 votes

Office 2016 OEM without LiveID account 138 votes

Office 2016 Activation and installation without an email account 172 votes

return to the same process for activating Office 2016 that was used for all previous versions of Office. No "Live" accounts!  26 Votes

The Office 2016 Activation process is impossible for business's that purchase Microsoft licensing OEM. 70 votes

Activation without a live account. 7 votes

Need Office 2016 activation WITHOUT a Microsoft account! 6 votes

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Allow Business Admin Portal to manage Office 1-time payment licenses toohttps://office.uservoice.com/forums/285186-general/suggestions/11448504-allow-business-admin-portal-to-manage-office-2016

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Improve Highlightinghttps://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/9389778-improve-highlighting

Make the full spectrum of colors that are available in Shading also available in Highlighting. I often use Highlighting to mark important or unusual text streams and I would like to search for particular colors of Highlighting .

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Visio 365 monthly specifically for Consumer licenses -https://office.uservoice.com/forums/285186-general/suggestions/10936428-visio365-monthly-for-consumer-365-users-and-oth

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Recreate the single text margin around page like 2010 and earlier -http://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/9253599-bring-back-classic-text-boundaries- Marked as “under Review”, so there is some hope … <grin>

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Restore Radial Menu to OneNote439 votes total Feb 20 2016 ****148 votes Include radial menu in desktop onenote

  20 votes Radial Menu -

183 votes Bring back the radial fly out menu in the W10 Store version of OneNote -

  42 votes Bring back Radial Menu and Camera insert in Windows 10

  16 votes- Bring back Radial Menu for Windows 10 App

  25 votes- Keep the OneNote Windows 8 UI over the Windows 10 Beta UI

plus a bunch more pen requests

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Add mind mapping to OneNote -https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-windows-windows-phone/suggestions/6160979-mindmap-functionality?page=4&per_page=20 

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Custom installation from Office 365 (2016) / Return MSI installer option - ****https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/9939513-custom-installation-from-office-365-2016

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Word 2016 Style Pane bug -mouse pointer wrong https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/11196345-word-2016-style-pane-corrupt-or-buggy-after-update

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Add PowerPivot back to Access (and to Excel in all bundles)https://access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop/suggestions/10284183-add-pivot-charts-back-to-access

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Add BI/PowerPivot back to Excel in all bundles -https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/9018823-make-the-power-bi-family-powerpivot-powerquery

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'Worksheet' Tabs to Wordhttps://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10024812--worksheet-tabs-to-word

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