Office 365 Excel slower than a snail

[Zak33]

Office used to be good. And excel used to be fast.

Then it started "greying out" as the newer versions went online behind my back.

Using the exact same large excel doc, day in, day out, which slowly grows with more data, I cull large areas of it every quarter and place them in back up files.

But swapping from a previous version of Office, to 365 ... its clearly not happy.

Is there a way to stop it greying out on large documents? They dont have macros, they dont have V lookups or pivots, they're really not complex, they're just lots of rows and columns
ANd it's not really lots... 600 by 20 columns, maximum though mutli tabbed.

It's nearly unusable. Its causing me about 30 minutes to 1 hour delays per day, and I know I just have to sit and wait... looking at it... darent; close it... just wait until it repsonds again.

Ryzen 1700X, 16gig and two quick SSDs and a Radeon 590 in this rig, so I'm not short of horsepower and FTC at 60mb/s

[Saracen999]

At the risk of grandpa and egg-sucking, have you tried the slow office 365 on a virgin similarly spec'd machine.

Those symptoms kinda sound like either Windows or 365 has its knickers twisted. Thats a techie term, BTW.

Some kind of library version clash, or summat? Maybe?

[DanceswithUnix]

I thought you could still use Office 365 locally, with no Internet connection. So shouldn't be that slow.

Google seems to suggest disabling hardware graphics acceleration as a first step: 1.File >Options >Advanced >Display >Uncheck the option Disable hardware graphics acceleration

Talking of which, if the sheet is fairly simple have you tried Libreoffice with the OpenCL based Calc?

[ik9000]

Office used to be good. And excel used to be fast.

Then it started "greying out" as the newer versions went online behind my back.

Using the exact same large excel doc, day in, day out, which slowly grows with more data, I cull large areas of it every quarter and place them in back up files.

But swapping from a previous version of Office, to 365 ... its clearly not happy.

Is there a way to stop it greying out on large documents? They dont have macros, they dont have V lookups or pivots, they're really not complex, they're just lots of rows and columns
ANd it's not really lots... 600 by 20 columns, maximum though mutli tabbed.

It's nearly unusable. Its causing me about 30 minutes to 1 hour delays per day, and I know I just have to sit and wait... looking at it... darent; close it... just wait until it repsonds again.

Ryzen 1700X, 16gig and two quick SSDs and a Radeon 590 in this rig, so I'm not short of horsepower and FTC at 60mb/s

Zac, by grey do you mean like screen hangs and pauses when you try and use say, the right-click context menu and links therein? I get that too and it's driving me mad. 2nd tier menus take forever (30seconds+) to launch when on old office eg 2010 at home it launches instantly, like it should.

I find 365 gets slower and slower the longer it goes on when it thinks you should install an update. Rather than tell you I have to manually check for updates and suddenly it improves. A periodic machine restart sees it work vaguely normally with only a little bit of lag, then it cumulatively gets worse and worse again as the weeks go by.

One thing that may be document related is hidden junk if this is a long-term file which has been hacked around over several years and excel versions. Is it a .xls or .xlsx format? I've seen some old .xls carry significant baggage that caused some weird cack that really shouldn't be possible. It can end up with a load of hidden data that you wouldn't know was there normally, but can access via macro. Secret named ranges and all sorts of garbage. I'll see if I can fish out the detect and purge routines later, but best thing to try would be a to try create a fresh file by extracting the relevant data only. Then you just get the current info and no hidden crap.

[Saracen999]

I thought you could still use Office 365 locally, with no Internet connection. So shouldn't be that slow.

As I understand it, there are three variants of Office:-

- web-based app, requires no local install but (obviously) requires Web,
- MS 365 - subscription variants, full local install and offline use, but include some services that need Web, and
- full non-sub variants. Operate fully offline except updates, mail, collaborations, etc. That option isn't the 365 version, though.

So yes, they can run fully locally.

[ik9000]

NB the perpetual licence versions Office 2019 etc don't have all the latest features. for average user it won't matter, but every now and then you want the features of 365. The new dynamic range addressing annoys me though. It wouldn't hurt for them to add a toggle option to use new or old naming display. You only really want to see the @ if you're trying to do complicated array formulae. For everything else it's just bloat and makes it even harder to skim read formulae.

[Zak33]

Zac, by grey do you mean like screen hangs and pauses when you try and use say, the right-click context menu and links therein? I get that too and it's driving me mad. 2nd tier menus take forever (30seconds+) to launch when on old office eg 2010 at home it launches instantly, like it should.

this exactly

I would try for updates but I've only had it a week

[Zak33]

I thought you could still use Office 365 locally, with no Internet connection. So shouldn't be that slow.

Google seems to suggest disabling hardware graphics acceleration as a first step: 1.File >Options >Advanced >Display >Uncheck the option Disable hardware graphics acceleration

Yeah it works with the rj45 unplugged..but the rest of my work suffers a tad if I'm not online !

I will disable hardware graphics accel... v good idea. Thank you

[Ozaron]

Since you say it's a simple spreadsheet with no operations, I highly recommend clicking first cell, CTRL + SHIFT + End, copy everything, and paste as values onto a brand new spreadsheet.

I don't know what Excel holds onto but it definitely saves more than you see and I've worked with it enough to suffer from that, not just losing performance but gaining file size for no reason, sometimes stopping me from uploading or sharing something to a network location with a size cap..

[ik9000]

Since you say it's a simple spreadsheet with no operations, I highly recommend clicking first cell, CTRL + SHIFT + End, copy everything, and paste as values onto a brand new spreadsheet.

I don't know what Excel holds onto but it definitely saves more than you see and I've worked with it enough to suffer from that, not just losing performance but gaining file size for no reason, sometimes stopping me from uploading or sharing something to a network location with a size cap..

I've had that too however copy and pasting sometimes brings crap with it. I've found the best way to be to extract data and formulae using simple macros to a clean file. That way it only copies what you want it to. The routine isn't too complicated and you can bring formatting, validation etc too if required. I suppose you could achieve the same by a series of copy, paste special to bring various elements across only.

However what call is describing is what I'm also having and it happens on new files as well as old ones. Something in 365 is not right. I've yet to find a solution.

Zak what gpu and drivers are you running?