Excel 2997 ?

[Tank997]

Can any of you suggest a great PC configuration for the ultimate Excel PC?

I do a lot of Data crunching, and my PC has become very slow, it's only a two year old PC but it's starting to remind of the 1980's… days of waiting hours for the PC to complete it's calculations.

I am looking to buy or build a great Excel PC, but I would like some of your suggestions on where to start, and what components will improve the performance the most. I would think processor performance would be the most important but I’m not sure.
I am running Office 2007 on windows XP with 512mb RAM and a Pentium 4 processor.

It took 4 hours to “convert numbers stored as text” in 45K rows, in a 16mb worksheet. So I thought it was time to upgrade and came up with these questions. (5 other sheets in the workbook with lots of things going on in the background)
1. Should I upgrade to a 64 bit system to speed this up?
2. Should I upgrade to windows vista to speed this up?
3. Should I add memory to speed this up?
4. Does the video card matter? (I am running on a three moisture system
5. Will dual or quad core make this 3 o 4 times faster?
6. Is there a web site for the “best and latest” PC for Excel?
7. Should I look for other features like an excel keyboard or other things I did not mention?

I appreciate all of the help you can give my with this and think it’s a good discussion point form this board.

Thanks in advance for any help
Tom

 

[Richard Schollar]

1. No - Office2007 is 32bit software so this wouldn't cause any improvement
2. I find Excel2007 slower in general than 2003. Anecdotal evidence (ie what I've heard from others) is that Vista is slower than XP. So...
3. Yes - 2Gb min with Vista I think. Note that for 32bit Vista, max memory is still around 3Gb, so any more is simply a waste
4. No - Excel is only 2 dimensional, so a 3D shunter like an Nvidia 8800 GTS ain't going to have any impact over an integrated solution
5. It will make it faster (or should do) as Excel2007 is multi-threaded, so in theory the more cores the better the performance. I would highly doubt whteher this would translate into x4 for a 4 core PC, however. If you do have multiple applications running whilst you have Excel open, it should speed things up significantly
6. No idea
7. Ditto.

As a first step, I would upgrade memory in your existing PC - push it up to 2Gb and see if that makes a difference. You should really be aiming for 2 x 1Gb matched pair kits so the memory can operate in dual-channel mode (assuming your motherboard supports this - if only 2 years old it should) which will also help you maximise performance.

Good luck with the build - please let us know how you get on!

 

[Norie]

Tom

7. There is an Excel keyboard.

 

[ExcelChampion]

Wow, you must really like Excel.

Howeve, if you plan on creating apps for others, I would suggest using an average machine. If you have a powerfl machine, your apps might run fast and efficient, but run it on an average machine, like your end user might be using, it moght run sluggish.

 

[Smitty]

It took 4 hours to “convert numbers stored as text” in 45K rows, in a 16mb worksheet.

Microsoft Access.

Nuff said.

Smitty

 

[ExcelChampion]

It took 4 hours to “convert numbers stored as text” in 45K rows, in a 16mb worksheet.

Actually, I was confused by this. What was the method you used?!

If converting to a number, copy a blank cell, select the range to convert, Paste Special/Values/Add.

Should take a split second.

 

[NateO]

It took 4 hours to “convert numbers stored as text” in 45K rows, in a 16mb worksheet.

I too am curious as to how you did this.

If you set Calculation Mode to manual and used Text-to-Columns on the columns in question, it should take fractions of a second per column.

 

[Lewiy]

It took 4 hours to “convert numbers stored as text” in 45K rows, in a 16mb worksheet.

I’m guessing that this was done by clicking the little green triangle in the cell and selecting “convert text to numbers”. This, I have found, can indeed take some time to do, especially if you have a lot of calculations going on in open workbooks as I think (correct me if I’m wrong guys) that Excel recalculates the worksheets after each individual cell conversion using this method.

The suggestions already given above are much more efficient ways of doing this.