Comment from Robert Kosara
Time: Friday, October 10, 2008, 4:15 pm

Interesting, I would have expected Excel 2007 to gain more from more memory than Excel 2003. Would be interesting to see if there is a difference in calculation vs. drawing, as somebody suggested. But I guess it will be mostly due to the more elaborate drawing engine in 2007.

Comment from JP
Time: Friday, October 10, 2008, 4:42 pm

So I take it you are still using 2003 for most of your charting work? :)

Comment from TM
Time: Sunday, October 12, 2008, 5:33 am

I experienced significant performance inrease of calculation in 2007. If you perform same tests on dual core machine, i think, the results will be much different.

Comment from Charles Williams
Time: Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 11:11 am

Hi Jon,

There are some performance comparisons of calculations (plus VBA and Open/Close) using a range of workbooks on both single and dual core at

http://www.decisionmodels.com/VersionCompare.htm

XL2007 calculation speed on single cores is sometimes faster than XL2003 and sometimes slower: depnds on the nature of the workbook.

regards
Charles

Comment from gman
Time: Sunday, November 9, 2008, 1:53 pm

I have dual core. The problem is Excel 2007 was NOT OPTIMIZED FOR DUAL CORE in regards to charts.
Just to DRAW the chart/refresh it, I always see only 1 core being used!
I also have Windows XP SP2 and 2 GB Ram. The ram usage is never full, but the cpu is always at 100% in Excel 2007 when redrawing a chart….

Comment from Ed Green
Time: Thursday, December 4, 2008, 4:59 am

Hi Jon,

I’ve spent ages trying to optimise code that adds error bars to charts, and have concluded that the chart refresh is – as you show here – extremely slow indeed in 2007. Which is a great shame, given that some of the pivot table improvements are so useful.

You win some, you lose some…

Ed

Comment from Peter Ennis
Time: Friday, May 1, 2009, 11:10 pm

Jon,
I submitted an application to Chad Rothschiller, program manager for Excel,
related to the poor charting performance and provided a link to your analysis.
They were aware of it and doing performance testing with the recommendation
being to try again with SP2.
Excel 2007 SP2 running on XP seems to be worse! I will do some testing
on Vista and eventually Windows 7.
Do you plan to rerun this test for Excel 2007 SP2?

Thanks,

Peter

Comment from John McCallum
Time: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 4:59 pm

I can scarcely get Excel 2007 to create graphs at all. What took milliseconds in Excel 2003 is taking minutes in Excel 2007. Probably 4 orders of magnitude. My graphs are much larger than your tests here – typically around 18000 data points. From what I have been able to find on the web, it seems Microsoft was aware of this and created a fix that worked. That fix was supposedly included in SP2, which is what I am running. As Peter pointed out, SP2 still has severe performance issues.

Comment from Andreas
Time: Friday, April 23, 2010, 6:05 am

If you are creating the graphs using a VBA macro there is a workaround for the slow charting in Excel 2007. The workaround is to use simple + or X markers instead of the diamonds, circles, stars etc.

myChart.SeriesCollection(1).MarkerStyle = xlMarkerStyleX

I use a macro to create multiple scatterplots, having multiple series; with around 10-20k datapoints in each; on multiple sheets, in a workbook. The redrawing performance then becomes comparable to Excel 2000.

Comment from Andreas
Time: Friday, April 23, 2010, 6:07 am

The + or X markers can of course also be set manually… :)

Comment from Mr. Kariranta
Time: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 10:31 am

Thanks for your informative page!

I was just starting processing work of a huge set of measurements for my Masters thesis with X2007 when i noticed the problem with the drawing of charts. So then I was almost upgrading my HW with some memory and graphics card when I found your page and the real reason for the problems.

At the moment I have some 12000 data rows and I typically use 3-5 columns for my graphs and the working was just horrible when the screen draw the data points every time I even touched the graph.

I tried the hint of using X and + markers and it truly helps, the slowness is away, but I’m no way going to change the markers separately for each graph, it is just unnecessary and annoying thing to do when you have to produce large series of graphs specially as everything works fine with older versions. Or does someone know how you could change the markers to x or + by default?

Comment from Mr. Kariranta
Time: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 4:18 pm

Yep, I noticed that and also that it is possible put your own chart template with x- and +-markers as a default chart style – tried that and it initially seems to make the graph making bearable, I’ll at least try to work that way for a day or two and postpone the decision of downgrading.

Comment from Dmitry Kolosov
Time: Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 9:18 am

Not only is Excel 2007 notoriously slow when it comes to drawing the charts.
Too often I see it redrawing a chart in an infinite loop!
I have a Scatter chart with 18000 points. If I scroll the page so that the chart goes out of view and then scroll it back – Excel redraws the chart (it takes 8 seconds on my Dual-i7 with 4G RAM) – then immediately redraws it again, and again, and again – infinitely

Comment from Chris Wharton
Time: Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 9:05 pm

Excel 2007 seems to have a problem with chart events. The VBA code you wrote in GetXYonAnyChart does not work in 2007