Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.

I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
2000.

Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.

TIA,

Mike.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

"Michael Robbins" <michael.robbins@us.cibc.com> wrote in message
news:c6c65b14.0411041140.402e7c0c@posting.google.com...
> Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.
>
> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
> 2000.
>
> Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
> of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
> outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.
>
Excel isnt designed for heavy tasks.

Option 1: Export it to Access, but youre going to face the same sort of
problems.

Option 2: Export to an SQL server via an application, or PHP/ASP will do the
job in the same way.

Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go for
either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system with 4-ish
gig of ram.

hamman

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

<Excel isnt designed for heavy tasks.>
Who told you so? What do you define "heavy"?

<Option 1: Export it to Access, but youre going to face the same sort of
problems.>
What if the application is calculation-intensive rather than data-intensive?

<either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium>
The number of processors has no effect on Excel's performance. Excel will
not make use of Itanium's 64-bit processing.

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel



"Hamman" <none@example.com> wrote in message
news:aLadnQ2wzuI_FBfcRVnyrg@eclipse.net.uk...
>
> "Michael Robbins" <michael.robbins@us.cibc.com> wrote in message
> news:c6c65b14.0411041140.402e7c0c@posting.google.com...
>> Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.
>>
>> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
>> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
>> 2000.
>>
>> Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
>> of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
>> outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.
>>
> Excel isnt designed for heavy tasks.
>
> Option 1: Export it to Access, but youre going to face the same sort of
> problems.
>
> Option 2: Export to an SQL server via an application, or PHP/ASP will do
> the job in the same way.
>
> Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go for
> either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system with 4-ish
> gig of ram.
>
> hamman
>

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Excel does not make use of more than one processor and even Excel 2003 does
not make use of more than 1Gig of memory, previous versions make effective
use of much less.

>
> Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go for
> either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system with 4-ish
> gig of ram.
>

AMD is probably faster than Intel for Excel because the floating point unit
is faster. Itanium or Athlon 64 are probably currently slower for Excel than
the fastest 32-bit chips.

For significant speed gains the best solution is to eliminate the Excel
calculation bottlenecks. Usually the slower the Excel calculation the easier
it is to produce large (10x or 100x or greater) speedups.
See http://www.decisionModels.com/optspeedk.htm for a real-world example of
speeding up Excel calculations by a factor of over 75000.


regards
Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.1 now available
www.DecisionModels.com

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Hamman wrote:
> "Michael Robbins" <michael.robbins@us.cibc.com> wrote in message
> news:c6c65b14.0411041140.402e7c0c@posting.google.com...
>> Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.
>>
>> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
>> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
>> 2000.
[...]
> Option 3: Keep the sheet as it is and upgrade the system. I would go
> for either dual or quad (if you can find it) xeon or itanium system
> with 4-ish gig of ram.

Dual or quad probably won't do anything for Excel, which is single-threaded.
I don't know about later versions, but at least Excel 2000 takes no
advantage of 2 CPUs on my system. Also, a socket 939 Athlon 64 based system
would probably edge out the P4's unless you're doing a lot of
searching/sorting.

(but I agree that getting it out of Excel and into a more suitable
application is probably the way to go, the "suitable application" depending
of course on what you are actually doing with the spreadsheet)

--
Michael Brown
www.emboss.co.nz : OOS/RSI software and more
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Charles Williams wrote:
[...]
> Itanium or Athlon 64 are probably currently
> slower for Excel than the fastest 32-bit chips.

Itanium slower, yes (unless MS has a native version). Athlon 64 slower, no.
Even if it were slower in 64 bit mode (I don't think MS has a native 64-bit
compile of Office yet though), just run a 32-bit version such as whatever
the current version is. The A64 is faster clock for clock compared to an
Athlon XP when running in 32-bit mode.

[...]

--
Michael Brown
www.emboss.co.nz : OOS/RSI software and more
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Michael Robbins wrote:
> Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.
>
> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
> 2000.

you gotta be kidding
well err i suppose if you have a huge spreadsheet.......
a nice new hdd would boost it somewhat, note windows 2000 is slow to boot,
but otherwise it's fine, don't be put off by the boot time

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

"Michael Brown" <see@signature.below> skrev i melding
news:h9wid.3347$op3.139081@news.xtra.co.nz...
> (but I agree that getting it out of Excel and into a more suitable
> application is probably the way to go, the "suitable application"
depending
> of course on what you are actually doing with the spreadsheet)

Ditto that. But the OP wants speed. I've never seen huge amounts of "dead
data" slow the old lady down. So my guess is calculation problems, and no
one calculates like Excel..

A week or so ago I tried to assist a person with literally thousands of
Vlookup formulas, all covering complete columns. He said it took 45 seconds
to recalculate after every cell entry. I wrote him a minor sample macro that
entered a Vlookup function in the neighbor cell on cell entry, calculated it
and immediately replaced it with the result value, and said that it could do
the same job as all of his formulas. Unfortunately he didn't understand the
the idea immediately and therefore refused to test it, a pretty common
approach. But it was definitely a task for Excel even if the initial
workbook was bloating.

Best wishes Harald

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

Michael Robbins wrote:
> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet.
> What can I do to improve speed?

Intriguing question, but, unfortunately, vague. I can't
vouch for this, but it may be worth investigating:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/26805143
http://www.turboexcel.com/

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.excel.misc,it.comp.hardware.overclock,alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

"Michael Robbins" <michael.robbins@us.cibc.com> wrote in message
news:c6c65b14.0411041140.402e7c0c@posting.google.com...
> Please don't be upset about the general nature of this message.
>
> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
> 2000.
>

You don't say what the 2.4GHz cpu is, if we're talking celeron you'll
get a big improvement by just changing to a faster Northwood (or
Prescott if you can cool it)processor.

> Can someone suggest a machine? Price isn't important, within reason
> of course. The cost of rewriting the sheet in C++ will likely
> outweigh the cost of buying a suped-up PC.
>

64 bit isn't really going to help you until M$ release a 64 bit version
of excel, maybe you could look into the availability of 64 bit versions
of other office suites on Linux.

As others have suggested, look at ways of optimising your calculations
and code first, if possible find a few friends with different computers
and try your sheet on their machines.

--
Apollo

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd (More info?)

> I need to increase the speed of my Excel spreadsheet. What can I do
> to improve speed? I'm running a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM, Windows
> 2000.
>

1) Look at the software... it's always easiest to tune software than anyone
thinks it will be

2) Faster hard drive... 7200 rpm with 8 megs of cache.. be sure your Windows
swap file is on the faster partition (Windows will use it even when you have
lots of free memory)

3) Go to a dual Opteron.. the memory bandwidth you can get on this platform
is better than any other commodity hardware... and it lets the operating
system (disk, video, etc) run on the second CPU even if Excel won't use it
directly. also the Opteron runs 32 bit code extremely fast, not to mention
the 64 bit upgrade path

4) Add 2 to 4 gigs of memory. On the Opteron platform, this is much cheaper
that the equivalent on a P4

Last but not least, remember that free advice on the internet is worth what
you pay for it!