Excel for Mac Running Very slow

I don't know if this will be of any help to anyone but thought I'd offer up our experience. We were running Mac OS X Lion and the latest version of Office and had problems with Excel being horribly slow as well. I did some testing and noticed that when I turned off Suitcase Font Management that Excel ran fine. I assumed it was a confict with Suitcase so I contacted Extensis to see if they were aware of any issues with their product and Office. They did some testing on their end and could also reproduce the issue, but it turned out that it was not a conflict with Suitcase, but rather the fact that Office expects at least two of the Office fonts (Arial.ttf and Calibri.ttf) to be active. Since we use many fonts in our graphics businees we try to streamline our basic fonts and only have those active that we use on a regular basis so we had removed all Office fonts and did not have the expected fonts loaded. Once I added them back into our active fonts Office sped up quite nicely, No more slow copy, paste or print. So you may want to check out your fonts to make sure these two are active on your system. Since we use Suitcase for font management I simply loaded them in with our standard font set through Suitcase, but if you don't use Suitcase make sure they are in one of the appropirate Mac OS font folders so that they load at startup then reboot your computer and give Office another try. Hope this is helpful to someone.

Just a small precision about step 7) : the "MICROSOFT" folder is not located directly inside "FONTS (REMOVED)" but into another folder named with the time you emptied your font library.

Chris, how do you turn off Microsoft Knows Best is my first question. 2nd is how do you access your files if you sign in as a non administrator? I have a new MacBookAir.

Hoho this made me laugh. There isn't a "Microsoft Knows Best" switch as such, what I meant by that was all the Preferences that do things automatically. These can be a huge drain on resource, because the program is constantly looking for things to improve or check. In other words go to preferences and turn of everything that probably uses the word "Automatically...(do something)".

As further update on my post, I did get to the root cause of the problem, and although the above helped eventually I got the problem back so the above isn't the solution.

Basically there appears to be a conflict with the fonts that Microsoft uses when you install Office, and the fonts that may already be installed on your mac.

Firstly the mac has a default set of fonts that you cannot and should not remove. These are found under Macintosh HD>System>Library>Fonts.

These fonts apply to all users in the system.

Then there is the next level of fonts, that you may have purchased, or had installed by various programs. These are found on

Macintosh HD>Library>Fonts

This is where I found the conflict. I removed all the fonts from this folder (putting them in a temp folder on the desktop) and microsoft office ran like a dream immediately. I then put each one back one-by-one until I had identified the offending fonts, which by the way came from an older installation of office. I cannot recal them now because they've all been permanently deleted from my system.

There is another layer of fonts under each user just for completeness:

Macintosh HD>Users>yourusername>Library>Fonts

And you should check here too. I basically put all the fonts I found here into the folder in the desktop, and when they got put back it was at the level

Macintosh HD>Library>Fonts.

Hope that helps

Chris D'Costa

http://blog.sossee.com

You are the man. Totally worked.

I can finally work on my computer again after weeks of this junk.

This solved my problem!

Beth,

Your suggestion worked for me. After activating the fonts Arial.TTF and Calibri.TTF through SuitCase, Excel got working as a normal.

Cheers!

Your the man man. This has probably been at the root of sluggish office for mac for the last 5 years 🙂 😐 😠

Not sure if I need these fonts or not, but for now I think I'll just leave them out. excel feels like it used to on windows years ago!!!

John

PS might one be able to work with the "Fonts Disabled" folder instead of moving it to a folder on the desktop? I'm assuming this is what the folder is for: troubleshooting?

Hmm. Unfortunately my beginning euphoria was a bit too quick. Excel is again quite sluggish, e.g. when switching windows from one open workbook to the next.

...

MBA 8GB RAM 2GHz i7 - version 10.8.5 (Fresh new install)

Excel version 14.3.6

I have been having same slow response times with my excel. I have followed all the recommendations (changed preferences, cleaned up fonts, repaired disk persmissions etc) here but alas none have fixed my problem. Even opening local small files (16KB) from my desktop takes 10+ seconds.

If I have two open sheets on my desktop, when I click from one to the other I get spinning wheel for about 5-6 seconds before I can do anything. Cut and paste a simple line and again spinning ball for 5-6 seconds. It is extremely frustrating to say the least. When I close a file, again it takes sometimes close to 10 seconds for the sheet to disappear. I am running excel natively rather than using VM Fusion as everyone tells me to do. I guess there is no answer to this long outstanding issue :-(

Do you have the two fonts Arial.TTF and Calibri.TTF installed?

In my case that was the solution.

I have just uninstalled Font Suitcase Fusion 4 from the imac that had excel, word and printing slow down. Now the iMac is running super fast in all applications. Hope this helps, although I will have to keep looking into how Suitcase Fusion can be optimised for Microsoft and graphic apps.

Hi everyone,

I also chime in, however, with a real solution hopefully. Following actions cleaned my machine up and made MS Office for MAC lightning fast again.

Problem Symptom | Opening and closing of any MS Excel file extremely slow taking sometimes up to 2 minutes. Same with closing such spreadsheets with the side effect of consuming very high CPU power up to 110%. Ultimately the file closes after minutes.

System Specifics | (1) Besides MS Office for MAC 2011 I have apps like Techsmith's SnagIt installed with creates an abundance of autosaved files. Pls refer to your system preferences of SnagIt (command+,) to check the path for autosaved files. Delete these.

(2) Especially after using MS Office for MAC for some time it dumps many files into so-called autosave folders. To my knowledge Office looks up these folders before opening, writes to them during processing and when closing the program.

Remedy | (1) Consider the font resolution presented by torasama by eliminating duplicates and cleaning up fonts flagged as erroneous. (2) Navigate to ~/Library/Autosave Information (where ~ is your home folder) and delete all Office autosave folders. In addition consider to empty your cache (~/Library/Caches) which most probably bursts already. (3) Optionally, reinstall Office 2011 again. This take only a few minutes.

Hope this helps guyes.

reg,

wiley

Hi Wolfgang,

Nice to hear at least your machine is lightening fast again. Im getting so frustrated with Excel (and Word) that I'm getting ready to throw the **** machine out my window.

I do not have SnagIt installed so cannot check for the autosaved files here. I have checked my font issue from many previous posts. Hasn't made any difference. I found the ~/Library/Caches folder but am hesitant to delete all these folders. A search shows many people saying this is not necessary and is fudder from the old Microsoft OS days. I only deleted the folder with excel in its name.

I'm beginning to think maybe the only way to productive again is to run Fusion which I have been trying to avoid.

Even small 40Kb files on my local desktop take a long time to open and close. Whenever I click on a cell to start typing it takes up to 10 secs for the spinning ball to disappear. Clicking between sheet A and sheet B takes forever. Very very frustrating.........

Hi diatham73

I hope this helps and if you have tried it my apologised as I have not read this whole thread. Create a new user log in a open excel and see if the issue still exists, this is how I troubleshoot this type of problem.

If it does nothing, i would check you are running just the bare minium fonts and open activity monitor to see what is using up your CPU, along with clearing all font caches.

I found that font suitcase fusion 4 caused this issue with one of my imacs in our office, I had tried all exensis' recommendations but sadly none worked.

This imac now runs excel really fast and a slow printing issue has been solved.

Good luck and let me know if this helps.

NB