Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

Yes, MS has stopped shipping the XP virtual computer so you have to use another one. 

VirtualBox is a good free alternative virtual computer environment (I have played with it) where you can install a 32 bit copy of Windows to run Office 97 on a 64 bit version of Windows used to boot the computer. This allows your computer to take advantage of more than 4GB of ram through 64 bit Win while also allowing you to have the virtual 32 bit Win to run Office 97.   If you have a Professional or Enterpise version of Windows you could use the included Hyper-V virtual computer environment.

When you have a Windows or Office license it gives you the right to install and run the 32 or 64 bit versions. For Windows, you would have to do a clean install of 32 bit Win which would be very disruptive and limits your machine to accessing only 4GB (actually slightly less) of RAM.

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

Don't fall for the trap to upgrade to a more powerful computer, I did this, and apart from the unnecessary added expense it made no difference whatsoever to the speed or performance of the 2016 excel programs. I cannot believe that Microsoft has provided an inferior upgrade. Working on hugh excel programs is my living, and excel 2016 is a disaster and impossible to work with... I honestly don't know what next to do, as i can't work with this at the way it is....

Ditto on 3 PC's so far here...

We're uninstalling & installing 2013...

this sux

Dear Bob Ancher,

Please tell me one thing whether this version (Excel 2016) been tested with END Users using huge data calculation in excel?

If your team gone through this test ?  please tell me what's the system configuration where this test has been taken. let me try the same configured system. But keep in mind that this particular excel 2016 slow performance is not an configuration issue.

Understand one thing this Excel 2016 performance issue is not from only one person, and also not from any particular hardware compatibility. There are many users replied this forum and even in our office almost 500 Emp having this same issue including myself. Did you people analysed why this is happening only in 2016 and not in 2010.

Maximum MS Excel are used by business purpose, so Excel Graphics is not at all important, speed and performance is very much important compare to every last version to new version, that is what the most expected by users.

Has this version of Excel 2016 is made for kids who plays with graphics and eye full of colours??

There is a big bug in this 2016 Excel version. " 30 minutes work has increased to 3 hours now to complete"

Please try to resolve this ASAP as we are facing many problem due to this ...

This is my system conf.

Hi, 

I just upgraded my Excel program from 2007 to 2016 and have followed every step in this thread to try solving the issue of very very very slow operating with Excel 2016. I haven't been able to make work as I was with 2007. As soon as I get about 3 spreadsheets opened, it starts to come very very slow to operate. 

It seems that I'll have to cancel my subscription to Office 365 and come back to 2007.   :( 

Hope someone find the solution... 

Using a fresh new Windows 10 x64 with i7 processor, 10GB RAM. 

Regards, 

Micboule