Speed up Excel when opening and first editing

[andrew_milonavic]

Hi,

I have a 60MB workbook that takes 8+ minutes to open on my quad core laptop. It opens only using a single core (20%cpu).

After the workbook opens the first few adjustments I make causes the Excel to hang and takes a few seconds (3-5) to respond. After I save the initial edits it's faster to respond and no longer hangs on future edits.

Excel saves using 26% cpu.

Calculations however are blazing fast, 100% cpu usage and on average less than 1/2 a second to calculate even if there are thousands of changes.

Ive already set calculations to manual and turned off recalculation on saves.

Is there anything that can be done to speed up opening the workbook and stopping the initial hang when editing besides throwing more resources at the problem. I am pondering switching to a desktop where I can buy a processor which has faster single threaded performance.

Thoughts?

Thanks

Andrew

 

[mole999]

screen redrawing uses resources usually

 

[andrew_milonavic]

Hey Mole999,

Thanks for the fast reply.

I'm not familiar with screen redrawing but I'll google it. Is it something that can be sped up? Can it be GPU accelerated?

Thanks

Andrew

 

[mole999]

depending on your computer, but if you think every pixel has to be addressed and set to a colour, every change draws CPU time which is much like a game screen.

Application.screenupdating = false, turns it off so the machine doesn't show what is happening, then true when you finish your routine.

I've got used to my slow programmes, but wish I can make them faster some day.

The other thing might be 32bit windows can only address 3Gb, so anything more is unused

 

[andrew_milonavic]

Hey Mole999,

I might try some tests using my dedicated GPU vs the onboard and see if it makes a difference. I don't have any formatting, conditional colors or shapes in the model.

I'm running the 64 bit version, though my excel workbook has never used over 2 gigs of ram, 16 gigs available.. I don't have any volatile functions.

I'll test the dedicated GPU and if that doesn't help I might just upgrade to a desktop and throw more resources at the problem. On benchmarks a 9900k would have 61% faster single threaded performance and 149% faster multi threaded performance vs my 6700hq. Who knows if that will translate directly into excel but excel is vital for my work so I might just do it regardless.

Thanks

Andrew