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Hi Guys,
I have recently noticed that my Excel for Mac has become incredibly slow. I am using an almost new iMac and have a business enterprise solution account with the programme installed on 4 office computers, however this problem is only affecting my computer.
The spreadsheet I am using has less than 100 rows and takes 5-10 seconds to load whenever I click on another cell let alone try to edit a value or place a new value in.
This is heavily affecting my productivity at work. I have tried to fix this by removing bad fonts and giving the iMac a general cleanse but it's not had any affect on Excel performance.
Computer specs are:
Please help!
A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.
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.
Switch from Page Layout to Normal view (on the View menu). Solved the problem for me - from excruciatingly slow to normal zippy performance.
Hey I think I just fixed this for myself. Looking at another forum post regarding Microsoft Word 15.29.1 acting very slow too, it says to go to: - System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy Tab > Accessibility (on left menu), and disable any 3rd party apps that have certain controls over your computer.
On my laptop, I installed a window manager called "Divvy" years ago (it updates regularly), that allows me to resize app windows using keyboard shortcuts. Once I disabled this app from "controlling my windows", MS Office 15.29.1 *(specifically Excel) works beautifully.
Try it and let us know!
Daniel
I found this on-line and it helped me:
Go to settings, click on Accessibility, go to Display, click on Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency.
This helped my Excel experience on the Mac.
Tom
I had this problem today and figured out that my problem occurred because I had pasted in a couple of characters that the program was having trouble reading. My spreadsheet contains a TON of text froma variety of sources in multiple languages and one of the sources came with a character that resulted in a "square" shape in Excel. This killed everything (on my Activity Monitor, excel was taking up 100% of my CPU).
I deleted the squares and it solved everything.
Thanks for advise. In my case it was Dropbox.
Latest Office update has totally solved the issue for me!
The recommendations you mention only apply to some very rare occasions.
In such cases you should note a general sluggishness of you Mac, definitely not only related to Office.
Excel can handle large and complex datasets with ease under normal circumstances.
Microsoft Excel for Mac is a horrible product full of flaws, bugs and silly UI nonsense made by geeks who don't work with their own product on a daily basis.
But back to the slowness we sometimes experience :
On a very regular basis it wants to verify the Subscription online and
when it fails, you get the choice either to 'try again' or 'remind me later'.
When you select 'try again', it might succeed after a number of times when it is your lucky day.
If you press 'Remind me later', the popup is gone but Excel starts doing something crazy in the background.
Restarting, rebooting, changing settings and trying everything else doesn't seem to solve the issue.
Excel seems to try to access all drives (maybe network drives?) and tries to mount all possible drives it can find.
Since Mac's have SD card readers build in, it takes a while before it figures out it can't mount nonexistent drives.
If you look at the "Activity Monitor" you see a process called "diskarbitrationd" going crazy for every move you make in Excel. If you leave Excel alone, the process is gone again.
So I presume Excel is somehow trying to look for a possible subscriptions or something else on one of the drives.
Just moving left or right through the sheet becomes unbearably slow
If you copy 400 cells, it probably tries looking for your Subscription 400 times.
When you get the reminder for the Subscription again and keep on retrying until it can validate the Subscription,
all problems are gone instantly and "diskarbitrationd" is never going crazy in the background.
So, whenever you get the choice to check your subscription, keep on retrying until it succeeds.
Microsoft should really provide the ability to report bugs somewhere because there are way too many bugs in the Mac products.