Excel 365 on Windows 11 extremely slow and constantly freezing

For me, it only seems to be slow on files that have macros.

Yes that is what I find as well

Also generally works ok except when closing the file

It now saves quickly - but if select close (either in menu or top right 'X' button then it more or less hangs

I note in task view that the amount of memory being used build rapidly as well

So I can use it fine now - so long as I don't close any workbooks.

I do that at the end of the session - save each workbook then press cntrl-alt-del - select task view and close excel

I was getting extremely slow screen updates. When I move my mouse the buttons and other UI elements would only highlight about once per second. Every time I move the mouse and click I had to wait about five seconds for the display to catch up.

For me, selecting Optimize for compatibility did not solve the problem. But because it was a display update issue I tried disabling the GPU and that solved it!

File > Options > Advanced > Display > Disable hardware graphics acceleration.

Restarting Excel afterward was not required. It immediately started working right.

This is in Office 2016, but I believe the setting is the same in Office 365.

My GPU is an Intel UHD Graphics in a new Dell XPS 17 running Windows 11. It's a very high-end machine to be giving such a crappy experience.

Oh my god thank you so much for this.

I've been monitoring this thread for 2 months now and I began to increasingly use Excel on Onedrive and through Remotedesktop of my Uni because this was really hindering my work with Excel.

It was just like you described, laggy graphics, and nothing on this thread before this had resolved it.

Your solution resolved it immediately, no restart required. Mine's a high end machine too, similar config as yours and I had been almost convinced to switch to a Mac next time because of this experience.

Very much appreciated; works extremely well so far.