There has been much made in this forum and the Excel community at large about the fact that Excel 2007 can be slow and seems bloated when compared to previous versions of Excel. There are many software tweaks and techniques that can go a long way towards ameliorating these complained of Excel 2007 slows. These solutuions are easily located in this forum, at Microsoft and elsewhere. However, optimal hardware configurations are more difficult to come by. Am I correct in my finding that Microsoft seems to be satisfied with discussing only minimum and not optimal hardware requirements for Excel 2007??
Excel 2007 has new capabilities that can make one's mouth water. I am personally interested in the staggering amount of rows and columns Excel 2007 offers. If only I could figure out how to fill 80% of them up in some usable fashion. Please, for discussion here, make the unlikely assumption that Excel 2007 has been perfectly optimized for execution of tasks on large spread sheets. I am curious about the optimal hardware configuration for handling large spread sheets and hope this thread might generate information on that subject.
Presently I am able to operate matricies of 200,000 rows by 50 columns. Five of these columns contain complex formulae that operate on the variables found in the other 45 columns. The 45 columns containing variables were also derived from formulas, but it was necessary to reduce these formulas to values in order for the remaining five columns of formulae to calculate quickly. If the 45 columns are not reduced to values before calculating, the calculation times are very long. However, if the 45 columns of variables are values instead of forumlae, the remaing five columns of formulae will calculate in seconds. If the amount of variables (as values) is increased significantly beyond 200,000 rows by 45 columns, Excel 2007 slows down a lot. The full capability of Excel 2007's spread sheet size has not been realized by me.
I am running an hp nx6325 notebook and AMD 64 dual core 2G processor with 2gig ram on Microsoft XP Pro SP2. The video card does not have dedicated ram and thus shares the 2gigs of system ram.
Some questions:
Since Excel 2007 makes use of multithreading, wouldn't an upgrade to a quad core processor allow large sheets to be calculated more quickly?? Is there any talk that AMD dual core processors work better than Intel dual core processors (or visa versa) with Excel 2007??
What about ram and large sheets?? Forget the money for the sake of discussion. Would 4gigs allow larger sheets to be processed than 2gigs?? Since Vista uses a lot of ram, might not XP be a better choice?? Isn't it true that the fullest use of 4gigs of ram can only be achieved on 64bit systems?? What can be done to make sure that the most ram possible is available to Excel 2007?? I am suspicious that my video card's sharing of system ram is causing Excel to hang at times. Could this be true??
So what is the configuration for the "dedicated Excel 2007 dream machine" (notebook and desktop), made for mac daddy jumbo large spread sheets stuffed full of complex formulae??? Any resources would be deeply appreciated.
Do tell, please..........thanks so very much for your help
Excel 2007 has new capabilities that can make one's mouth water. I am personally interested in the staggering amount of rows and columns Excel 2007 offers. If only I could figure out how to fill 80% of them up in some usable fashion. Please, for discussion here, make the unlikely assumption that Excel 2007 has been perfectly optimized for execution of tasks on large spread sheets. I am curious about the optimal hardware configuration for handling large spread sheets and hope this thread might generate information on that subject.
Presently I am able to operate matricies of 200,000 rows by 50 columns. Five of these columns contain complex formulae that operate on the variables found in the other 45 columns. The 45 columns containing variables were also derived from formulas, but it was necessary to reduce these formulas to values in order for the remaining five columns of formulae to calculate quickly. If the 45 columns are not reduced to values before calculating, the calculation times are very long. However, if the 45 columns of variables are values instead of forumlae, the remaing five columns of formulae will calculate in seconds. If the amount of variables (as values) is increased significantly beyond 200,000 rows by 45 columns, Excel 2007 slows down a lot. The full capability of Excel 2007's spread sheet size has not been realized by me.
I am running an hp nx6325 notebook and AMD 64 dual core 2G processor with 2gig ram on Microsoft XP Pro SP2. The video card does not have dedicated ram and thus shares the 2gigs of system ram.
Some questions:
Since Excel 2007 makes use of multithreading, wouldn't an upgrade to a quad core processor allow large sheets to be calculated more quickly?? Is there any talk that AMD dual core processors work better than Intel dual core processors (or visa versa) with Excel 2007??
What about ram and large sheets?? Forget the money for the sake of discussion. Would 4gigs allow larger sheets to be processed than 2gigs?? Since Vista uses a lot of ram, might not XP be a better choice?? Isn't it true that the fullest use of 4gigs of ram can only be achieved on 64bit systems?? What can be done to make sure that the most ram possible is available to Excel 2007?? I am suspicious that my video card's sharing of system ram is causing Excel to hang at times. Could this be true??
So what is the configuration for the "dedicated Excel 2007 dream machine" (notebook and desktop), made for mac daddy jumbo large spread sheets stuffed full of complex formulae??? Any resources would be deeply appreciated.
Do tell, please..........thanks so very much for your help