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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

Feb 29, 2016 6:11 AM in response to leon21

I tried the font method and rebuilding the cache, nothing helped. Then I tried running Win 10 on parallels and the Excel on Win 10 runs normally like it's on an independent machine. So what I'm thinking is Microsoft just don't want Office to run at full speed on Mac. After all, Office is like the #1 reason people would want to switch to a Mac or a Windows.

Well played Microsoft.

May 17, 2016 9:52 AM in response to leon21

I was encountering the same problem this morning. Incredibly annoying. I followed the steps below to clean up the fonts, re-started the computer, and everything is back to normal. I did not have time to run disk utility, since I was working in a client location today and had to get back to work as soon as possible, with the least interruption. I will do that later.


But I can attest that cleaning up the fonts made all the difference. Now normal, and fast. Hope that this can work as well for you as it did for me.

Nov 30, 2016 3:00 PM in response to leon21

I tried all the suggestions above without success; still very sluggish. I noticed that when I opened a new workbook, it seemed to be fine. It was only after opening an existing file that it became slow. I also noticed that when I clicked on "Open Recent", it was very slow to populate the list of files. So, I cleared the recent list and boom, fixed. No idea why but an easy thing to try nonetheless.

Excel for Mac Running Very slow

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