What is fastest hardware for Excel?

[Michael Robbins]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.

TIA,

Mike.

 

[Niek Otten]

That already sounds like a pretty fast machine.

In general, useful tips about speed, memory usage etc can be found at

www.decisionmodels.com

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel

 

[Hamman]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.

Excel isnt designed for heavy tasks.

Option 1: Export it to Access, but youre going to face the same sort of
problems.

Option 2: Export to an SQL server via an application, or PHP/ASP will do the
job in the same way.

Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go for
either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system with 4-ish
gig of ram.

hamman

 

[Niek Otten]

<Excel isnt designed for heavy tasks.>
Who told you so? What do you define "heavy"?

<Option 1: Export it to Access, but youre going to face the same sort of
problems.>
What if the application is calculation-intensive rather than data-intensive?

<either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium>
The number of processors has no effect on Excel's performance. Excel will
not make use of Itanium's 64-bit processing.

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel

 

[Charles Williams]

Excel does not make use of more than one processor and even Excel 2003 does
not make use of more than 1Gig of memory, previous versions make effective
use of much less.

Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go for
either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system with 4-ish
gig of ram.

AMD is probably faster than Intel for Excel because the floating point unit
is faster. Itanium or Athlon 64 are probably currently slower for Excel than
the fastest 32-bit chips.

For significant speed gains the best solution is to eliminate the Excel
calculation bottlenecks. Usually the slower the Excel calculation the easier
it is to produce large (10x or 100x or greater) speedups.
See http://www.decisionModels.com/optspeedk.htm for a real-world example of
speeding up Excel calculations by a factor of over 75000.


regards
Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.1 now available
www.DecisionModels.com

 

[Michael Brown]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

[...]
Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go
for either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system
with 4-ish gig of ram.

Dual or quad probably won't do anything for Excel, which is single-threaded.
I don't know about later versions, but at least Excel 2000 takes no
advantage of 2 CPUs on my system. Also, a socket 939 Athlon 64 based system
would probably edge out the P4's unless you're doing a lot of
searching/sorting.

(but I agree that getting it out of Excel and into a more suitable
application is probably the way to go, the "suitable application" depending
of course on what you are actually doing with the spreadsheet)

 

[Michael Brown]

Charles Williams wrote:
[...]

Itanium or Athlon 64 are probably currently
slower for Excel than the fastest 32-bit chips.

Itanium slower, yes (unless MS has a native version). Athlon 64 slower, no.
Even if it were slower in 64 bit mode (I don't think MS has a native 64-bit
compile of Office yet though), just run a 32-bit version such as whatever
the current version is. The A64 is faster clock for clock compared to an
Athlon XP when running in 32-bit mode.

[...]

 

[Geoff]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

you gotta be kidding
well err i suppose if you have a huge spreadsheet.......
a nice new hdd would boost it somewhat, note windows 2000 is slow to boot,
but otherwise it's fine, don't be put off by the boot time

 

[Harald Staff]

(but I agree that getting it out of Excel and into a more suitable
application is probably the way to go, the "suitable application" depending
of course on what you are actually doing with the spreadsheet)

Ditto that. But the OP wants speed. I've never seen huge amounts of "dead
data" slow the old lady down. So my guess is calculation problems, and no
one calculates like Excel..

A week or so ago I tried to assist a person with literally thousands of
Vlookup formulas, all covering complete columns. He said it took 45 seconds
to recalculate after every cell entry. I wrote him a minor sample macro that
entered a Vlookup function in the neighbor cell on cell entry, calculated it
and immediately replaced it with the result value, and said that it could do
the same job as all of his formulas. Unfortunately he didn't understand the
the idea immediately and therefore refused to test it, a pretty common
approach. But it was definitely a task for Excel even if the initial
workbook was bloating.

Best wishes Harald

 

[BenjieLop]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.

TIA,

Mike.

You already have a fast processor. I don't think anybody can sugges
what kind of computer you should have to speed up Excel or any othe
software that you might run.

Personally, I think it is only you who can decide what you need becaus
only you can answer the question -- how fast should fast be

 

[Fishface]

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet.
What can I do to improve speed?

Intriguing question, but, unfortunately, vague. I can't
vouch for this, but it may be worth investigating:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/26805143
http://www.turboexcel.com/

 

[richardlwilson76]

Try third-party speeder tool:
http://www.download.com/Speed-Gear/3000-2121-10290541.html?tag=lst-0-1

 

[Apollo]

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

You don't say what the 2.4GHz cpu is, if we're talking celeron you'll
get a big improvement by just changing to a faster Northwood (or
Prescott if you can cool it)processor.

Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.

64 bit isn't really going to help you until M$ release a 64 bit version
of excel, maybe you could look into the availability of 64 bit versions
of other office suites on Linux.

As others have suggested, look at ways of optimising your calculations
and code first, if possible find a few friends with different computers
and try your sheet on their machines.

 

[juniper622]

This might help too.

Enhance the speed of your macro's. Turn off screen udating.

By turning off the screen updating your macros will run much faster.
It will also prevent the disturbing flickering of screen pictures tha
can frighten inexperienced users. The following sentence will turn off
the screen updating :
Application.Screenupdating = False

It's not necessary to turn on the screen updating. It wil
automatically turn on when the macro is finished. Sometimes you want t
turn on the screen updating after
you have turned it off, e.g. when you want to display a dialog or
message box to the user. The following sentence will turn on the scree
updating:
Application.Screenupdating = Tru