Comments on: Excel 2007 Chart Performance – Revisited

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:59:56 +0000

John - I think the real fix to Excel 2007's charting performance problem is Excel 2010. I wrote about this in Chart Redrawing Performance of Excel 2003 and 2010.

By: John McCallum

John McCallum — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:59:45 +0000

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.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:03:43 +0000

Hi Peter -

I think I did some similar tests on the SP2 beta, but it was long ago and far away, and I don’t recall where I may even have saved the results. As it was a beta, the results are probably not representative anyway. I do in fact plan to rerun the tests. I do not really expect a big difference: a priori I think the 2007 SP1 and SP2 will probably be grouped together, both substantially different than 2003.

By: Peter Ennis

Peter Ennis — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:10:30 +0000

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

By: Ed Green

Ed Green — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:59:46 +0000

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…

By: gman

gman — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:53:41 +0000

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….

By: Charles Williams

Charles Williams — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:11:05 +0000

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

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:20:00 +0000

Hi TM -

That’s interesting. I do not have a dual core processor, so I cannot validate your findings. Do you have any data comparing 2003 with 2007-dual core that I could post here?

By: TM

TM — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:33:26 +0000

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.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:52:43 +0000

JP -

I use Excel 2007 for two main purposes:

1. So I can develop dual 2003-2007 user interfaces for my clients.
2. To test for bugs and inconsistencies (for clients and to verify what I read in online forums).

I do no work of my own in 2007, and very little other work for clients in 2007.