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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!
This question is a bit on the old side, so please let me do a quick summary of things under user control that pop into my head that can affect responsiveness of Excel:
Have enough free RAM
Have a video card with video RAM
File location - network or local volume
I/O rates to the file host
Speed of connection type (SMB, Apple, Windows, Box, etc)
Multi-threaded/multi core version
Number of fonts used in the workbook
Number of fonts available on the system
There are some things not under user control, such as processes brilliantly sleuthed by SjaakSpoiler. It might matter whether you have a 365 subscription or a stand-alone install.
Recently Microsoft changed how users can engage with the Excel product team. If you are willing to accept beta versions, you can interact directly with the product team in the special Insider forum. To join, go to the Help menu in Excel and choose Check for Updates. In AutoUpdate app click the box to join the Insider program, then click the pop-up to join the Insider Fast program. Keep in mind Insider Fast builds are not supported nor should they be used in production. You will get frequent, large downloads of new builds that may have new, incomplete or temporarily broken features that are being worked on. But if you can handle the risk, you will have a direct say in how the product is evolving.
The latest build is 64-bit. I think everyone, regardless of other factors that may be in play, will notice improved responsiveness.
As to other factors affecting speed, let's keep this discussion alive and try to work out each user's particular bottleneck. Be sure to share your hardware specs, file location information, subscription type, version of Mac OS and update level of Excel you have (Excel menu > About Excel).
If you join the Insider program, don't add to this thread. Start a new one in the Insider forum, and be sure to include all the details I just mentioned in your question.