OFFFICE12: Slooooooow

Michael Griffiths wrote:

I've been using the beta version of Office 2007 or the past week or so.

Generally it's very nice. Usability is dramatically improved, commands are more intuitive, and it's pleasent using the programs.

I have, however, have the misfortune of using Excel 2007 - with the new file formats - on a *big* spreadsheet for the last few hours. It's only 8 MB in 2007 (nice size recuction - was a 32 MB xls file), but Excel 2007 can't handle it.

Let me explain what this spreadsheet is. It's a model built by a a guy with no programming experience. It still manages to be completely dynamic: change the source data, and the output changes. I need to get some data off the spreadsheet; make a few PivotTables. Basic stuff.

You get things like 20 columns that all VLOOKUP and calculate some data. VLOOKUPing the concatanated result of two VLOOKUPs, which in turn are VLOOKUPs, whose result is dependent on a cell that manages to be just short of a circular reference. 4,000 (whichis a drop in the pail, really) results, 8 lookup tables, loads of PivotTables.

It takes, when working, around 5 minutes to calculate or save on a 3 GHz machine with 2 GB RAM.

Office 2003 can handle this just fine. It's a pain to save, but it's rock-solid. It's fast, works well, and nothing screws up.

NOT SO in Office 2007.

It can take up to 4 minutes simply to remove a bloody filter on a Table. It's taken over 10 minutes to Calculate. Spent 2 minutes deleting 3 columns from a worksheet.

And it CRASHES. Oh, boy, does it crash.

Want to save? Oh, look, I spent 3 minutes fooling you with the status bar before crashing! But don't worry sir! I can revocer it for you! Do you want to send a report to Microsoft? Yes? Good! Let me spend 8 minutes preparing the report. Whoops, you're not on dialup are you? It's going to take 237 minutes to transfer the report on dialup. You're not? Good! Can I send a chunk of your file along with it, too? Yay! And hey, I've recovered the document. Do you want me to spend another 6 minutes OPENING it after I've so kindly REPAIRED it for you?

On, and on, and on.

Not to mention the fiddling little problems like throwing "cannot access PivotTable data" messages at you. That, yes, apply when you try to make a new PivotTable to replace the one that isn't working.

Not. Good.

On a sour note, it's probably the XML nature of the new file formats. If they is after Microsoft has spent so much time optimizing XML compared to OpenDocument, I'd shudder to use ODF in a similar senario.

I hope the release version doesn't crash as god-damned much on everything but the piddly little everyday files as it does now. Right now, Excel 2003 is leaps and bounds better in terms of stability - and sorry, the new features (like conditional formatting) don't make up for it. If I do no work for 3 hours trying to get a document stable enough to work on (before downgrading), I don't care how many new features there are. 3 hours output in a subpar system is leaps and bounds better than 0 hours output in a new, shiny system.