Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

Bob,

Certainly appreciate you looking into this. I had already disabled graphics acceleration. Besides, the comparison was performed on an out-of-the-box Surface Pro 3, with i5 processor and Win10. So the comparative test is done on only one computer, works very good with the old version of Excel on this Surface Pro. Hard to believe its graphic drivers are wrong, too, since both the computer and the software are Microsoft products.

Unfortunately, I can't install Office97 on Win10, I guess it has 16 bit installers or something, so I run it on XP on a virtual drive (Oracle VM VirtualBox) on the Surface Pro. It works great. Also, Excel 2010 seems to have no problem running my "test" program at a reasonable speed (a Monte Carlo simulation, see earlier post).

I have installed 32 bit Office 365, but it is a 64 bit computer, of course.

There's also a wait state item (wowspl or something like that) that has to be cleared first through Task Manager whenever Excel2016 is run.

Too bad there isn't a switch to run it in Excel97 mode (keeping all the mathematical error corrections that came with the more recent versions, of course). I don't use much of those bells and whistles on the new version, so wouldn't miss them, if it made it run faster.

Regards,

Dave

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

Same problem here. Im not here to give any suggestions on this stuff thought, thats a job for the million dollars salary microsoft's program design engineers. Plus, people have to much in life as to be expending hours od tgeir precious time on trying to solve the problem of such an oligopoly. Thats why we pay them by buying their products and services. We should be moving forwards not backward. And today more that ever, time is too much of a valuable resouce, and to be efficient in this competitive world, speed is critical. So when desinging or upgrading a software, it's all.about speed.  Integrity brought microsoft to become the monster company that its today. If they want to claim to be the integral company that we thought we think of they, they should step up and refund every penney spent by hard working people on this thing, or else just fix the problem you created and save us all some headache. Do nothing and sooner that later we will all be looking at products from china or elsewhere.

I have to agree totally, the performance of Excel in 2016 is abysmal, just upgraded from previous version, BIG MISTAKE, will be asking for a refund and reverting back to Office 2010, it worked fine.

Icing on the cake is that some of the templates freeze Excel 2016, task manager is the only route out!.

Thanks MS, perhaps you might find time to fix the grief?

Looks like once my business commitments are over later this year I will ditch this fiasco and go SOLELY Mac, was aiming to get another Win machine however, having found Win10 slower and less stable than Win 7 and now this......

JC

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.  

I have a particularly large spreadsheet, with macros, references across different worksheets in it, etc. About 11Mb in size. It also uses iteration to converge to solutions in some parts, with 6000 iterations (it's a Monte Carlo run). I have a desktop computer equipped with Windows 7. My copy of Office97 would not load on this 64 bit build of 7, so I run it on a XP virtual disk, ON THE EXACT SAME HARDWARE. Office 365 I subscribed to a couple of weeks ago, and run it on Windows 7 Ultimate.

In XP, this workbook takes about 15 seconds to run.  In Office 365, it's 75 seconds, but before you can even get going, you have to go into Resource Monitor and clear the wait-chain for some printing polling item. What a pain!  (I also have a Surface Pro 3 (i3) with Office 365 on Windows 10, and you have to do the exact same clearing of the printer wait-chain item to make it work, too, and it takes equally long to run. That is not a true apples-to-apples comparison since it is a different machine, but is more evidence to me that there is something intrinsically screwed up in Excel 2016.)  I can put the following line at the beginning of the code in the workbook, but it doesn't seem to help with speed:

Application.PrintCommunication = False

Anyway, I think instead of making all these peripheral suggestions Microsoft makes that just obfuscate the point (reminds me of the techniques used by car dealer service managers to avoid doing anything to fix your defective car), I hope Microsoft take the growing evidence of poorer performance (and more importantly, our dissatisfaction with it) and fixes Excel. From my admittedly unscientific comparison, Excel 2016 takes 5 times as long to do the exact same computation, on the exact same machine, as Excel97. Is this just a ploy to make us all buy new, even more powerful computers, just to keep the status quo? All the shiny baubles and fancy graphics can go away as far as I am concerned, if that is part of the issue, especially that cumbersome ribbon. (Guess which version of Excel I use when I really need to get something done!)

Dave