Excel for Mac Running Very slow

Hi,

I have tried most of what you offered: checked my fonts, moved them to the desktop, opened a new user and nothing works! Excel is moving very slowly, and its extremely frustrating.

I have noticed some of you mentioned: font suitcase fusion 4. Since its an extension, I don't know if I have it or not. I don't deal with my fonts, as I am simply a PhD student, but can I have it on my mac anyway? And if so, how do I get there and remove it?

If you have any other solutions for this problem, will be happy to hear.

Thanks

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.

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

I never had any problems with Excel until I got a new Macbook Pro over the holidays (Jan 2013) with Mountain Lion pre-installed. Then Excel just began running incredibly slow as everyone here has experienced.

It definitely seems to be a Font related problem, and since I could create a new user on my machine and Excel ran fine from that login, I did some detective work with fonts and worked out a way to strip down fonts in my regular account log in.

Keep in mind that I don't do any work with fonts really, so it didn't matter to me if I lost any special fonts because I never actively installed any...just accumulated alot of extra fonts over the years from various apps and rolling my data over through multiple Macbook incarnations.

This is how I got everything running at normal speed again.

1) Open Font Book Application

2) Under EDIT, select LOOK FOR ENABLED DUPLICATES

3) Automatically resolve any duplicates found

4) Select all fonts, then under FILE select VALIDATE FONT

5) Remove all fonts showing any type of error or warning. Some will be system fonts and will require you to enter your password…go ahead and do it…get them all out of your system.

6) Under FILE, select RESTORE STANDARD FONTS. This will pull out everything except standard fonts. You will probably get a message saying that some of the standard fonts are missing and asking you to restore them by reinstalling the operating system…don't bother doing it though. The missing fonts are likely ones that got tossed out when you VALIDATED FONT and threw out the ones causing warnings/errors.

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.

8) Finally, for good measure use Disk Utility to repair disk permissions and then restart.

This processed worked on my brand new Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion, as well as my wife's 2 year old Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion.

I spent 3 hours searching forums and testing things yesterday and this finally worked...hopefully it can save others from wasting as much time as I was forced to.

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.

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

I just found this, did it, and it worked a treat!

Try turning off WYSIWYG font menus. The way I know to do this is:

exit all Office apps

run Word

Word menu: Preferences...

click the General section

deselect "WYSIWYG font and style menus"

Exit Word, then launch Excel and see if it made a difference. Might not help, but it's worth a try, especially if you have lots of fonts.

http://ask.metafilter.com/119081/Why-is-Excel-so-incredibly-slow-on-my-Mac

No, turning off WYSWYG doesn't help in any way. I have the same problem with Excel and am hoping for an answer. I have 14.1.0 and I haven't upgraded as yet due to the ongoing problem with the latest Office update from Microsoft.

Excel 2011 is horrible slow. If I use Office 2003 on a virtual environment running Win7 on my brand new MBP17" it's lot lot faster. Same picture if I use OpenOffice - a sheet with 40.000 line scrolls very well, on Excel 2011 it takes a second per line to scroll through the whole document...

No one in this thread is showing the operating system or how much memory their computer has. Using Lion with 4GB of RAM, the Office 2011 programs are dogs. Bump up the RAM as little as 2GB (to 6GB but preferably 8GB) and the difference is amazing. Even so, Excel is still the slowest of the lot.

Hi,

if it runs PERFECT with OpenOffice and with Office 2003 in a virtual environment I don't care about the hardware configuration. The native MS Office is MUCH slower - that's the reason why I don't like MS Office, but I've to use it as so many others must do... :-(

- whith this particular HUGE excel file, Numbers (iWork) is very slow, not as slow as Excel 2011, but still MUCH slower than OpenOffice and Office 2003 running in my virutal environment (it's Windows with Parallels and it is faster!)

- there is no 100% compatibility

I LOVE iWork - for personal use, not for business (compatibility issues)

one important hint: my huge Excel file here has a lot of filters, if I remove them scrolling is well. As I said before, OpenOffice and Win Office 2003 with active column filters don't have any issues regarding performance.

I have the same problem. Running 10.7.4 on a MacAir with Excel for Mac 2011. The only solution I found so far is to create a new (standard) user. Running the same spreadsheet is up to speed when logged in as the new user. But still haven't figured how to get Excel to run fast when logged in as administrator. Tried to delete duplicate fonts in Font Books App as suggested over web, but didn't see difference. Also suggested was to delete microsoft excel prefs in Library, but couldn't find them.

I have the same problem... Upgrade from Notebook HP to Macbook air, i5 1,8GHz, 4gb 1600MHz DDR3, Excel 2011....

It is IMPOSSIBLE to use Excel on Mac... Can't scroll.. Can't edit cells... Can't SELECT cells...

I tryed every tip told above, but still doesn't work for me!

Please, someone help us..

Thanks,

Lucas