Microsoft Excel for Mac is SO SLOW

Anonymous
2015-08-26T10:35:20+00:00

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:

  • 21.5-inch Mid 2014 iMac
  • OSX Yosemite
  • 1.4GHz intel core i5 processor
  • 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory
  • Intel HD Graphics 5000 1536MB

Please help!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | MacOS

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.

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Anonymous
2016-04-13T03:44:26+00:00

Switch from Page Layout to Normal view (on the View menu). Solved the problem for me - from excruciatingly slow to normal zippy performance.

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Anonymous
2016-12-29T22:27:45+00:00

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

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Anonymous
2018-03-01T21:45:37+00:00

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

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Anonymous
2018-01-22T21:28:10+00:00

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.

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Anonymous
2018-01-08T03:59:30+00:00

Thanks for advise. In my case it was Dropbox.

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Anonymous
2017-01-12T20:01:58+00:00

Latest Office update has totally solved the issue for me!

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-04-28T15:41:32+00:00

    This confirms what I experienced yesterday. I was on trains for 8 hours and wanted to get on with a spreadsheet I am working on. I got the Subscription reminder and because I was offline, clicked 'Remind Me Later.' For the rest of the day, Excel was unusable. A simple copy and paste operation of approximately 8 words took over 4 minutes to complete. At one point I attempted to 'Merge Across' three cells repeated on around 20 rows. After 15 minutes I gave up and 'Force Quit.' the app.

    Eventually I opened the spreadsheet in Numbers and worked on it there - which is painful in itself!

    I have noticed that switching from Page Layout view to Normal makes some difference

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