Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

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....

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.

Nice investigation.

It appears your problem installing Office 97 on win 10 is that you are running 64 bit win.  You can run 32 bit Win 10 on your 64 bit hardware. 32 bit Win will limit RAM to 4GB. Check out the options in this article:

https://www.infopackets.com/news/9815/how-run-16-bit-programs-windows-10-64-bit

True, same issue I had with Windows 7 Ultimate. But I just ran XP on it, which was included with it, on Windows virtual drive. I should have ordered Win 10 32 bit, but the virtual box works just fine, too. Thanks for your suggestion. -Dave

Nice investigation.

It appears your problem installing Office 97 on win 10 is that you are running 64 bit win.  You can run 32 bit Win 10 on your 64 bit hardware. 32 bit Win will limit RAM to 4GB. Check out the options in this article:

https://www.infopackets.com/news/9815/how-run-16-bit-programs-windows-10-64-bit

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