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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 is a very old thread. If you read through it, you will find that there are strategies to improve speed, plus Microsoft has made changes over time that have improved speed.
Another significant speed improvement is being tested right now in the Insider Fast build of Excel for Mac. Some calculations are now multi-threaded, a feature that has been long requested.
Switching to Insider Fast build is not for the faint of heart. It is pre-beta software, and Microsoft is hoping people will try it to see if it fixes issues. In particular, calculation speed might be much faster in Insider Fast. On the other hand, you might discover new bugs to report.
If this is for production use, stick with the general release build, But, if you want to be adventuresome, go to the Excel Help menu and choose Check for Updates. That launches AutoUpdate app.
In AutoUpdate click the check box to join Insider, then click the pop-up button and choose Insider Fast. The builds are large and sometimes even more often than weekly. You send feedback to Microsoft from within the Insider builds, and discuss these builds in the special Insider forums here in the Community.
Appended 11/19/18:
Keep in mind that Microsoft Excel is one of the most computationally and graphically resource intense applications you will ever use. Apple provides Activity Monitor app so you can watch your system resources. Are you using swap space? You need more RAM to work effectively. How much CPU RAM is enough? If Excel is slow, you probably don't have enough. I think 16 gig of CPU RAM is minimum for a moderate user of Excel workbooks having lots of calculations. Have more than 50,000 rows (records) in a data set? Then you won't be happy with the performance of Intel HD Graphics (Apple's polite way to say you simply don't have a graphics card and your CPU is doing all the computations PLUS all the video). If you want decent performance, you'll need a good graphics card that has 8 gigs of high speed video RAM.