Why is Excel so incredibly slow on my Mac?

April 9, 2009 10:14 AM

Why is Excel so incredibly slow on my Mac?

New aluminum Macbook and newly reinstalled copy of Office 2008. Excel is incredibly slow, with hangups and spinning beach balls for up to 20 seconds at a time, frequently.

Any suggestions on how to fix?

posted by kdern to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Also - sometimes as I type, only one letter at a time appears.
posted by kdern at 10:23 AM on April 9, 2009

How much memory do you have on that computer? What else is open? Excel can be a memory hog, and browsers definitely are memory hogs. If you have a bunch of memory in that new computer, I'm not sure why else it would be, but if you didn't upgrade the memory from the base level, I'd bet it's a lack of memory. The default of 1 GB they put in there isn't enough to combat the bloat of Excel 2008.
posted by explosion at 10:26 AM on April 9, 2009

By "newly installed" do you mean fresh off of the disk image, or with all Office patches and updates downloaded and applied? Out of the box, Office 08 was buggy as hell and froze a lot. After the updates it's still not the greatest performer, but definitely more manageable.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:26 AM on April 9, 2009

Yeah, run your updates if they haven't been done yet.

The aluminum MacBook comes with 2GB ram, so I don't think it's memory. My base model runs office like a freakin' pro.
posted by General Malaise at 10:42 AM on April 9, 2009

yeah, I had the same thing with Office 2008 on a 2006 Intel iMac w/ 2GB. Really slow; I assumed it was because Office Mac is now running C# code in a Java-like environment, but I'm told that Office is fully native so I guess that's not it.

One thing though is launch Activiity Monitor and verify you're not running out of memory; on my Mac if I surf the web for several hours ALL 4GB of my MBP's memory will be committed and things will slow down due to a general memory leak in Safari.

Eg. now I've only got 70MB free -- Safari is taking 323MB, Photoshop 320MB, WindowServer 220MB, Kernel Task 200MB.
posted by mrt at 1:17 PM on April 9, 2009

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.
posted by jmcmurry at 5:47 AM on April 10, 2009

In Office on Mac I've found the 'Grammar check as you type' has a huge impact on performance, you turn it off in the Word preferences.
posted by Lanark at 6:43 AM on April 10, 2009