- #EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES INSTALL#
- #EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES UPGRADE#
- #EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES WINDOWS#
There’s only one problem – it’s all still a bit clunky. Like the rest of the world, Office is heading into the cloud, and it’s going to allow all sorts of exciting new ways of collaborating when using Microsoft Excel. And afterwards, revert to the 32-bit version of Excel 2016 immediately. So, put simply, don’t use the 64-bit version of Excel 2016 unless you absolutely need to do so.
Importantly, while Modano works fine on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Excel, 64-bit versions of Excel often have compatibility issues with many add-ins, and add a layer of complexity when writing VBA macros and working with other parties, who will usually be using a 32-bit version of Excel. In fact, this statement is both incorrect and misleading, and it’s more accurate to say that any 64-bit version of Excel will almost certainly be slower than its corresponding 32-bit version, because it must do twice the lifting to complete the same tasks. Very few Excel users understand that the 64-bit versions of Excel use twice as much memory as their corresponding 32-bit versions of Excel, so it’s not as simple as saying that the 64-bit versions of Excel can open files twice as large. And if it is an issue, it’s usually a model scoping and design issue rather than an Excel issue.
#EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES INSTALL#
While this might not sound like much, from our experience building very large models for Modano clients it is more than sufficient to handle the vast majority of financial models without needing to install the 64-bit version of Excel 2016. Since July 2016, Excel 2016 has been large address aware, which means that the 32-bit version of Excel 2016 can use 50% more memory than the 32-bit version of Excel 2010. When using Excel 2010, many financial modelers experienced Excel crashing after exceeding the 1GB memory limit. Don’t use the 64-bit version of Excel 2016
#EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES WINDOWS#
Modano Moderator Note: Since this post Excel 2016 has become more stable, and Modano now recommends the use of the latest version of Excel, which on most devices should be the 64-bit version as the default Windows installation is now 64-bit. The remaining settings had no positive impact at all for me, so I switched them all off. Personally, the only one I leave switched on is the Smooth edges of screen fonts setting, as I find that some fonts appear jagged when this option is turned off.
None of the settings in this list are necessary, and all of them slow down your computer.
To switch off these performance-chewing annoyances, click on File, choose Options, select the Advanced tab of the Options dialog, and tick the Disable hardware graphics acceleration check box within the Display section, as shown below: Ironically, while the phrase hardware graphics acceleration might sound like a performance improvement, it’s really referring to a whole bunch of unnecessary animations happening while you use Excel that you hardly notice, but that actually slow things down. So, if you’re not using workbooks, close them rather than leaving them open to drag all the others down. And when custom ribbon items are thrown into the mix, including the Modano ribbon tabs, the impact is even more noticeable. We expected Microsoft to have better optimized the management of these windows, but basic testing shows that the rendering of Excel slows with every additional open workbook. Close unused workbooksĪ performance biproduct of the single document interface (SDI) is that each workbook has its own window which needs to be redrawn each time Excel is repainted on your screen. While the engineers at Microsoft obviously thought these ‘improvements’ were great ideas, I’m yet to come across a financial modeler who isn’t mourning the loss of performance that they have caused, so I thought I’d share some performance tips we’ve discovered at Modano that might help mitigate the pain. One of the main reasons for this that the Excel 2016 user interface supports high-resolution displays, and uses a single document interface (SDI), meaning that each workbook opens within its own window rather than them all opening within a single window as they did in Excel 2010.
#EXCEL 2016 SLOW TO OPEN NETWORK FILES UPGRADE#
Many of Modano’s clients are making the leap from Excel 2010 to Excel 2016 (I’m going to pretend Excel 2013 never happened, so if you're using Excel 2013 please do yourself a favour and upgrade to Excel 2016 immediately), and noticing that many things feel slower and appear to lag in Excel 2016. Modano Moderator Note: Strikethrough font has been used to indicate parts of this post which are no longer applicable as a result of improvements to performance and stability of Excel since this post was created.