MBP slow with MS Excel

Hi,
I just got a MBP 2.5ghz, 2gb ram etca few weeks ago.. and I have some weird delay with using any spreadsheets editor. I already tried iWork, the OpenOffice and of course MS Excel for Mac. I opened the same file (pretty big but not huge-nothing special) on all this software and all of them experience the same delay. Basically anytime you scroll to the next page (without having the page in memory-like previously viewed) it will be pretty rough, with nasty bumpy scrolling. Every cell you click has a small delay.

The biggest problem is that doing the same operation on Vista with MS Office will work so smooth you can't even tell you never opened the file before, or how big/small the file is-tested it with the same fil. It's smooth and nice. I understand Office for Mac might have it's flaws, but how come all (Numbers 08, Excel 08, Open Office Spreadsheets) are having problems displaying a file properly/smooth?

The OS/Leopard was freshly installed by me (just to make sure) on the full hard drive twice, so the OS it's not a problem; unless it's not properly designed to respond to operating a regular spreadsheet file. Can I do any tweeking to it to make more responsive?


-the file is a regular spreadsheet.xls used by a noname company on the net to display it's prices, nothing special, I didn't pick it up for a reason, but it happened for me to check the prices up yesterday and it pissed me off seeing how slow the whole thing moves.

 

If you are using Office 2004, then it could be because it is running on Rosetta, since that version of Office is not natively supported on Intel CPUs.

Of course, it could also be because Microsoft doesn't exactly favour Apple, so the Mac version of Excel does not optimise your file as well as the Windows version of Excel after opening.

 

Well, a .xls is the native file format of Excel so it would best be viewed in Excel. I believe Numbers in iWorks needs to convert it so it might not offer the best performance, plus Numbers is still in version 1. I believe Open Office doesn't use the native GUI system in OS X, but uses the X11 windowing system so that could explain it. And if you are using Excel 2008, then that is the explanation in itself. I find myself getting much better performance in Excel 2004, especially for large worksheets, than Excel 2008 even though 2004 runs in emulation under Rosetta. I'm currently using Excel 2003 under VMWare Fusion mainly due to better macro support.

 

This was my first thought - however you've said that you're using Office 2008 which is Intel-native. My copy of Excel 2004 is terribly slow but that's because OS X runs it through 'Rosetta' which converts PowerPC software into a format that the Intel processors can read.

This problem doesn't, or shouldn't, exist on the 2008 version. However it may be that, as stated above, that Microsoft simply hasn't built in the same speed of spreadsheet reading into Office for Mac that it does into Office for Windows. They are, of course, working with a system that is foreign to them.

Good luck,

--Tom

 

I was having the same problem with Excel 'til Microsoft put out some updates. I found those helped my Excel performance a lot. (The newest Office updates are out today...)

 

I installed the latest updates as of yesterday (service pack 1 for office I think) before posting this thread. I will try in a few minutes to see if I can find some other updates.

For everyone else: it's about Excel/Office 2008, not 2004/2003. Also, OpenOffice is the beta version but it's the one built for Leopard; they have another option for X11, but I didn't try that one (since it's not native I was thinking it might be even slower).