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Excel for Mac Running Very slow

2.4 GHZ intel core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram.


just click on a cell can take 1-3 min


if i need to change anything in a cell it can take any where up to 5 min (eg, changing melbourne to Melbourne)


ever worse if working of a server

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jul 18, 2011 7:01 PM

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Posted on Dec 17, 2012 3:51 AM

Hello All


I was pulling my hair out because of this problem, and was particularly annoyed because the older version of Excel runs fast, but of course it can't open the new .xlsx files. I wanted to upgrade because I also use Excel at work on a PC and I love the ribbon.


I have found the answer and it's pretty obvious when you think about it...


Turn off all the "Microsoft Knows Best" automatic checking that Excel (and Word and Powerpoint) do. Not just the font menu thing, but EVERYTHING in the preferences that does something "automatically".


The only thing I left on automatic was the "autosave" feature.


Now excel runs as fast as it's Windows counterpart.


Chris

89 replies

Jan 14, 2014 11:11 AM in response to torasama

When I got to this part of cleaning up the fonts, there is nothing in the FONTS (REMOVED) folder and now this seems to have affected my Word doc formatting and translating to pdf formatting. Any advice???


I'm running on Macbook pro OS X 10.9.1 and with the new mavericks update :/



7) Open your OS Library and look for the FONT folder. You should also see FONTS (REMOVED) and FONTS DISABLED. Open the FONTS (REMOVED) folder and find the MICROSOFT folder. Drag this back into your FONTS folder…it will proceed to copy over. i.e. a copy will remain in FONTS (REMOVED) and a new copy will be formed in FONTS.

Jan 15, 2014 1:10 AM in response to Jculverfit

Jculverfit,


Sorry, but I don't have any suggestions.


I wrote that process one year ago based on my research and what was happening with my machine running 10.8 (as I stated in my original post). Since that time there have been several updates for MS Office and of course now OS X is up to 10.9. There is a high likelihood that those steps are no longer applicable with MS Office and 10.9...unfortunately that is how things go with technology upgrades.


Hopefully someone else can weigh in and offer you some further advice.

Jan 15, 2014 2:23 AM in response to leon21

Well I finally upgraded to OSX Mavericks yesterday after our company finally gave the green light and so far I have to say I am happier with the performance of Excel and Word when opening and closing as well as editing. Maybe there were some improvement behind the scenes. Anyway if it gets back to its usual slowness I will certainly post back here.

Jan 27, 2014 8:51 AM in response to chris D'Costa

UPDATE to a post which I made earlier which apears to have been quite successful.


I have also found a problem with ADOBE fonts included in Acrobat Reader. There are a couple of fonts ArialMT and TimesRoman which appear to also conflict with MS Office.


If you have these two fonts anywhere sometimes MS Office looks for them and starts to use them, and this also seems to impact performance.


These fonts are sort- of needed by Acrobat Reader, but if you use the built in Apple program "Preview" then Acrobat Reader is probably not needed.


If you want to test this, just copy the fonts to a USB stick (as a back-up) and then delete them from the Adobe Fonts folder.

Apr 17, 2014 3:14 AM in response to leon21

Hi, I'd like to share my experience which is a bit different from other shared on this thread.


I switched from Windows XP to Lion on my PC.


The Mac Office was unable to open my Excel accounting spreadsheet correctly because of problem with date formats.


So apart from being ridiculously slow MS on Mac could not leave the sheet in Win compatible form.


What I did was to create a VHD image of my Win system and loaded it on Lion via VirtualBox in Seamless mode.


Now apart from Dock on a rigth side of screen I have Windows Start strip on a bottom.


The Excel still was twice as slow.


I upgraded my CPU to 4 core one from 2 cores to have 2 dedicated cores for VirtualBox. Still too slow.


Then I stumbled on this thread and switched to Manual in Excel Options \ Formulas \ Workbook Calculation and disabled Enable background error cheking on same tab.


Now my complex lookup formulas respond instantly.


User uploaded file

May 27, 2014 5:55 PM in response to leon21

i started having lagging problems with Excel ever since i updated to Mavericks.

cell copy-paste took 3-5 seconds every time even within same sheet, work was impossible.

it worked well under newely created user though.


i tried everythig - fonts validation, restoring, deleting, deleting Excel preferences, reinstalling Office - nothing helped.


eventually i made a startup USB disc, erased everything and clean-installed Mavericks - problem is gone, everything is super fast now. hope it helps

Sep 26, 2014 10:19 AM in response to chris D'Costa

This solved my problem big time! Thanks much!


A couple of weeks ago Excel started acting really weird: long delay to open a file, frequent crashes, long time to save a file, etc. While the ball was spinning as I was waiting for Excel to complete some action, I looked at the Activity Monitor and noticed that Excel was using 100% of my CPU. As soon as it completed the task of opening or whatever, then the CPU % dropped back to normal.


Per your suggestion I went to MacintoshHD:Library:Fonts


All of the fonts in this file had a date that was at least 6 months old except for the following list which displayed a recent date modified.


I dragged them out of Fonts, put in on my desktop, restarted Excel and had no more problems.


Hannotate.ttc

Hanzipen.ttc

Hiragino Sans GB W3.otf

Hiragino Sans GB W6.otf

Kaiti.ttc

Lantinghei.ttc

Songti.ttc

WeibeiSC-Bold.otf

YuppySC-Regular.otf

YuppyTC-Regular.otf

Excel for Mac Running Very slow

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