Windows 7, 8, 10 and Machine Speed for Excel

[agutts6]

Commonly-asked set of issues, but an ever-changing landscape... and the in my experience on a lot of machines, the Excel-God works in mysterious ways.

I use huge excel files, up to 50 MB. Mostly data files that don't go beyond ~15k rows and 20 columns, but with thousands of calcs off that data, including memory-hungry index-matches and the like. AA lot of inter-relation between different books, and different worksheets (think of a 'suite' of formulas, of different worksheets, in total maybe 300mb, with no individual worksheet surpassing 50-60mb). Quite adept at reducing those as much as possible, so not looking for advice in that sector so much, but simply hardware/software. No VBA usage, FWIW.

Recently had this machine through work: Amazon.com : MSI WS60 2OJ 3K-004US Core i7, 15.6" WQHD+ 3K Display, NVIDIA Quadro Graphics, Win 7 Pro Slim & Light Workstation : Computers & Accessories

Beast, obviously. But it came with an earlier version of Windows 8, which, as I was told by our IT department, was not very Excel-friendly. As a result, calcs were initially not going much better than they were on my previous much weaker machine (4 gb with lower processing speed).

I forget exactly what happened... whether it was the windows 8.1 upgrade, or if we reverted that machine to windows 7... but we made some sort of changes there and got the MSI machine cranking pretty well, so that it was clearly faster than the previous 4gb machine.

I need to buy a laptop now, and Excel speed is my only priority. My questions are....

--Does anyone have informed speculation on how the Windows 10 environment ought to be for Excel purposes?

--Beyond that, is there a clearly optimal configuration with respect to windows and/or office version? As in, is office 2013 with windows 7 great for speed, or is office 2010 with windows 8 a really great construction, etc? FWIW, all our calcs are really quite standard, so any new widgets/features etc that exist on 2013 but not 2010 are not clearly a concern here, as far as I can tell.

--Finally... I'm kind of a novice... from what I gather, my priorities for hardware ought to be... probably in this order.... processor speed, RAM size, # of cores in processor, hard drive (and is solid state or not?). So, I plan to invest heavily in a machine... and getting Excel to run even 10% faster is a huge value to me.

If anyone has comments, I'd really appreciate them. Better yet... if there's a current machine that just looks like an Excel-God... I'd be all ears for a link!

Thanks,

--AG

 

[Kuljack]

Hey Agutts6,

I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to speaking hardware myself, so I wouldn't be much help there... but you haven't gotten a reply yet and I wanted to ask you about the Calcs.

Are these being done via VBA or are they constantly running? It may run smoother, even with the atrocity of size if the automatic calculation was turned off to run in the background and turned on when results are needed.

Not sure if that's practical for your use though.

 

[Lidsavr]

agutts6,
Like you, I use some memory intensive Excel applications. I haven't reached the 50MB range yet, but I've in the lower 40MB range in some of my spreadsheets. What I've found is, the more RAM you have the better. I am currently running 16GB of RAM in my Windows 10 laptop and it is running smoothly. I recommend getting a quad-core processor so the processor can spread the calculating power across the cores. Out of respect for this forum, I will not recommend a CPU type or brand of computer; however, the two things that I mentioned will go a long way to a smoother Excel experience.

Charles (Lidsavr)