Optimal Hardware For Excel 2007

Glad to hear that you can speed it up as I am trying it for the second time and am so unimpressed with it's speed.

I would add to your list of hardware questions, does it make a difference if you are using 32 bit versus 64 bit processors (e.g., I am using a Centrino duo which while a dual core is not 32 bit as far as I know - XP sp3).

Now to find those software tweaks you mentioned!

Forgot to mention that I am running 3 gigs of ram (acer laptop). I recently bumped up from 1.5 gigs and was pleasantly surprised to find that 2gigs of lap top ram was only $59 (pc 5400 677mhz I think). It made a huge difference with Excel 2003 but so far Excel 07 seems slower.

Mike

My Dell laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo with 3Gb of Ram) is painfully slow at times too (in Excel 2007) - the computer overall was hideously slow compared to my 2 year old XP desktop, until I turned my Vista Home Premium into (practically) Home Basic (ie turned off Aero features/transparency), after which things speeded up noticeably. I haven't yet tried any spreadsheets with masses of formulas in them, but I have observed that old spreadsheets opened in compatibility mode (ie xl2003) can really struggle with calculation/macro execution.

What a shame there hasn't be more response to my original post.

Nonetheless, here is some info.

I am running Excel 2007 on Windows XP, and from what I have read and seen, I wouldn't touch Vista with a ten foot pole. Vista is as slow as molasses and it can't be helping Excel run faster. Yes, Excel 2007 is slower than the previous version of Excel even on Windows XP, but I need the extra rows. If I didn't need those extra rows, I would stay with the old version of Excel. Unfortunately, the Gates way of making software has resulted in the advent of new techno-jargon. The new word is "bloatware" and Vista and Excel 2007 are the pinnacle of megalomaniac Gates' bloatware achievement. It feels like a brick around my neck, but what can we do. He's a shameful monopolist and it's either his way or the highway. However, I wouldn't encourage him by upgrading to his bloatier versions of brickware unless their is some very compelling reason.

All that said, I can get Excel 2007 to be worthwhile since I do need more rows. One of the real tricks is to be sure your spreadsheets are not doing a lot of calculating for no reason. Here is a great site for explaining how to write a spreadsheet that is effecient, http://www.decisionmodels.com. It can't be overstated how important these sorts of optimizations can be in speeding up your spreadsheets. There are also many other tweaks and techniques for Excel 2007 that can speed things up and they can be found all over the internet. Check out the microsoft sites. One necessity for me is to set Excel 2007 to manual calculate so it's not calculating my sheets every time I press the enter key.

Another great new feature that Excel 2007 has is that it can use multiple cores when calculating. This scales nicely in my experience. Calculating times are halved with two cores. However, the sheet must be written correctly to get this advantage. There's no complicated trick to it and many sheets use all cores without even thinking about it. However, if your sheet has it's calculations set up to be preformed in a linear fashion, Excel will only use one core at a time. So, if your sheets are written correctly, the more cores the better. Some like to say that extra cores are like lipstick on pigs, but they are often gamers and this is not true if your are crunching lots of numbers on Excel 2007.

Memory is not going to effect the speed of Excel too much. Also, Excel 2007 does not use 64 bits so a 64 bit operating system will not give that much. All that said, there is a good reason to have a 64 bit operating system....I think. I would love comments on this. Here is how I read it. Although Excel does not use 64 bits, using a 64 bit operating systems allows Excel 2007 to use more memory. I have read in some places that Excel 2007 is limited to 2g memory, including on the site referenced above, but I have read in a couple of other places on microsoft's sites that Excel 2007 can use as much memory as is recognized by the operating system. A 64 bit operating system will recognize more memory than a 32 bit system. How much memory is recognized is complicated business that should have a thread of it's own. Either way though, 2g should more than do the job speed wise and a 32bit operating system can see most all of that. However, what if you are getting the not enough resources stop from Excel 2007? I get this when I try to cut and paste too big a piece. Excel 2007 wants me to do it in a bunch of smaller operations. That's a pain. If I had more memory like is offered by a 64 bit operating system, perhaps I wouldn't have this problem. Does anyone know?

Back to the dream machines for Excel 2007. What I found was as follows:

On the JNCS site the work station, number cruncher version, has two quad core 45nm Xeon processors (that's 8 cores!!) and can handle a way overkill of memory with Windows XP Pro 64 or Server. At under $5000 it's the poor man's supercomputer.

On AVADirect site the Clevo 900 Notebook with a Core duo Quad (four cores) and 4g memory with Windows XP Pro 64 at under $3000. It's the most powerful notebook to date for crunching numbers with Excel 2007 as far as I can tell.

Any help???

It depends on what compilers have been used for the various components for Windows and Office whether it can take advantage of multiple cores or not; and to some extent how well they are programmed to thread tasks over multiple cores.

On paper if you have XP pro you should be good to use up to a dual CPU x dual core setup; on Vista I have no idea what the limits are. Guessing it is 2x cpu x 4 cores for Vista Ultimate but there are so many flavours of said OS check with MS for the specifics!

It's another reason why I won't buy Vista until I have to - wasn't the whole shift to XP supposed to END the NT/95 disparity - they are just bringing it back with Vista ultra-boogie funk edition, etc. etc.!

I'd suggest a CPU with the biggest on-die Cache possible; backed up by as much, and as fast as physically possible RAM will be the best way to boost excel performance; followed by raw clock speed and number of cores last.

The reason I list number of cores last is because if excel solves problems "one-step-at-a-time" then there is virtually no benefit to having two or more cores working on a spreadsheet. If it's done intelligently, then it "could" split the workload of solving a dozen equations across the two cores and therefore be 2x as fast. But I don't believe that it does that...

64-bit instruction processing could be a benefit for calculations involving either huge numbers or massive floating point numbers; but again, I don't expect optimised versions of Office to have been compiled for different CPU configs and shipped on the disk. Given that a 32-bit integer or decimal is an insanely huge number in the first place it doesn't really have any benefit anyway for normal business applications. If you really did need to work on such exceptional data on a regular basis; then I'd expect a dedicated application to do it in the first place. Certainly any technical analysis that needs "good" accuracy I do doesn't go through excel, other than to summarise results.

The hardware barely exists in the first place for a quad-core setup short of spending a fortune as highlighted above...

Given that most large companies are still struggling to deploy Windows XP as it comes to the end of it's shelf life let alone think about Vista; is it any wonder people don't want to upgrade... For office or home?

I mean, why buy a 3 grand PC to surf the net and watch your finances when a 200 quid one will do exactly the same job? Certainly not for the eye candy... And any business interested in security wouldn't be using Windows Defender either as it's first line of defence... I hope!

Binraider,

I am one of those individuals that keep pulling my hair out when it comes to using Ex 2007 as a database. In light on the many excellent improvements Ex 2007 has to offer, I would give up the various "bells and whistles" for greater perfomance (well at least for now). I have noticed a big discrepancy between the performance when using 2007 vs any older version. In older versions I am able to manipulate ("sort", "group", "subtotal-grouping") rows and columns of data significanlty faster than an attempt through 2007 version. Actually, just today I could not sort or "subtotal-grouping" data that was 18,000 rows by 30 columns. I received an alert "Not enough system resources" and this is when everything starting hitting the fan. It dazzles me that 2007 version has more rows and columns than older versions, but yet I cannot manipulate the data when I reach around 18,000 rows??? I tried to manipulate the same data in an older version and it was no problem, this is where I question the Excel operating resources between the new and older versions.

In short, I am having trouble establishing what the underlying cause of my inability to perform basic data manipulating function in 2007 beyond the rows of 20k... Is this a CPU component issue or is it explained by the following:

"If you work with large workbooks, external data or charts sooner or later you will get one of the dreaded messages “Out of Memory” or "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources" or "Not enough System Resources/Memory to Display Completely" , regardless of how much RAM or how big a swap-file you have.
This is because Excel has its own memory manager and its own memory limits."

Any thoughts on why I experience the inability to manipulate large amounts of data using 2007... my wbks average around 12MB to 400MB. In addition, I attempt to use Macros to speed up some manual process'

Any advice would be great!

Thanks in advance,