Excel Office 365 2016 So Slow that I cannot use it

Hello John,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

To resolve this issue we need more information. Let us know the following:

1. Does this issue happen on all spreadsheets opened in Excel 365/2016 or a few?

2. Have you checked if you are able to open new blank spreadsheets and tried moving between cells and copying large amounts of data to a new spreadsheet within the same workbook, while working on the new blank spreadsheets?

You may also check if this issue occurs while working in the clean boot mode on your computers.

Refer the article below to start the computer in clean boot:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Note: The steps as mentioned for Windows 8 and 8.1 also apply for Windows 10.

After restarting your computer in Clean Boot mode open Excel 365/2016 and check if they work fine and you are able to move between cells and copy large amounts of data to a new spreadsheet with the same workbook.

If the issue resolves while working in the Clean Boot environment then follow the steps as mentioned under the heading ‘If you could not run a program before you performed the clean boot’ which is below the option What is next when I have a clean boot environment?

Important: Please refer to the section: How to reset the computer to start as usual after troubleshooting with clean boot of the Kb article to boot the computer in normal startup after fixing the issue.

Hope the above information helps. Please reply if you need further assistance.

Thank you.

There were similar complaints about 2013 apps when they were first released.  It was a bad interaction with very specific hardware and driver combinations.

Since you have already tried "every recommendation" you leave us nothing else to suggest. Please tell us what you have tried so we can see if we have any different suggestions.

Hello John,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

To resolve this issue we need more information. Let us know the following:

1. Does this issue happen on all spreadsheets opened in Excel 365/2016 or a few?

2. Have you checked if you are able to open new blank spreadsheets and tried moving between cells and copying large amounts of data to a new spreadsheet within the same workbook, while working on the new blank spreadsheets?

You may also check if this issue occurs while working in the clean boot mode on your computers.

Refer the article below to start the computer in clean boot:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Note: The steps as mentioned for Windows 8 and 8.1 also apply for Windows 10.

After restarting your computer in Clean Boot mode open Excel 365/2016 and check if they work fine and you are able to move between cells and copy large amounts of data to a new spreadsheet with the same workbook.

If the issue resolves while working in the Clean Boot environment then follow the steps as mentioned under the heading ‘If you could not run a program before you performed the clean boot’ which is below the option What is next when I have a clean boot environment?

Important: Please refer to the section: How to reset the computer to start as usual after troubleshooting with clean boot of the Kb article to boot the computer in normal startup after fixing the issue.

Hope the above information helps. Please reply if you need further assistance.

Thank you.

1. Does this issue happen on all spreadsheets opened in Excel 365/2016 or a few?  Doug225:  only happens when I open existing spreadsheets.  I was using Office 365 2013 previously.  New spreadsheets work as expected.  I have tried copying data converted to values to new Office 365 2016  but same slow running condition happened.
2. Have you checked if you are able to open new blank spreadsheets and tried moving between cells and copying large amounts of data to a new spreadsheet within the same workbook, while working on the new blank spreadsheets?  Doug225:  new blank spreadsheets work as expected.  When I copy data from old exisiting spreadsheet into new spreadsheet, spreadsheet turns sluggish and runs too slow to work.

Are these old Excel docs located externally or on OneDrive, or the local PC?

FWIW I use Excel on an almost daily basis, most of which have multiple sheets, and much vba, some docs were created under Office 2010 and I have had no such issues in any office version, 2013 and 2016

If you open Excel using the safe switch (Hold the Ctrl Key when starting excel) then within excel open the doc, what then?

Are these old Excel docs located externally or on OneDrive, or the local PC?  John Coxwell:  The old excel files are in Google Drive, loaded in cloud and on each of my 5 PCs I am using Office 365 2016.  . 

FWIW I use Excel on an almost daily basis, most of which have multiple sheets, and much vba, some docs were created under Office 2010 and I have had no such issues in any office version, 2013 and 2016.  John Coxwell:  I did not have any issues using old Office files until I uploaded Office 365 2016... I was using Office 365 2013 previously.  I also upgraded to Windows 10.  I had one laptop that still had Windows 7 Ultimate but it has same slow running issues as my other PCs runniung Windows 10.

If you open Excel using the safe switch (Hold the Ctrl Key when starting excel) then within excel open the doc, what then?  I have same slow running issues running Excel in safe mode.

I uploaded a clean copy of Windows 10 last night and reinstalled Office 365 2016....  very surprised this morning to discover I still have a slow running Excel program.  

Anyone have recommendations on next steps??  

This is turned into my full time job.

Download/Run this MS Utility https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=36852

Info

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2812744

And if you copy/move an old problem Excel file from cloud to the local drive, any change?

I'm having exactly the same kind of problem, fully related to using existing excel files made with Office 365 previous release 2015 and that were being managed without any issue at the time.

I am on a Win 8.1 pro laptop with 16 Gb of Ram...
Maybe there is a relation with images embedded inside the file, but not so sure.

I have run the scan utility above and the only thing I saw was a warning about an error on "outlook excel previewer", so I made the registry correction (follow the links that are in the scan utility results)

so not I no more am having any warning after scan,

BUT unfortunately it has not solved my "non responding" issue and slowness in Excel

Regards

I upgraded five personal household computers to Windows 10 last week and upgraded my Office 365 subscription to 2016.  Now all five laptops are having major issues running Excel.  Excel is very slow moving between cells and when I copy a large amount of data to new sheet, I have time to play a round of tennis before Excel responds.  Excel is too slow to use anymore.  

I have researched the issue for past 7 days and tried every recommended fix without success.  Apparently a great many users are having similar issues with Excel Office 365 2016.  Preparing to try out Google Docs spreadsheet... anyone using that?

I even brought an old PC out of mothballs with Windows 7 Ultimate but when I installed Office 365 2016 Excel had same slow running issues.  I suspect my Excel problems are in Office 365 2016.  How do I revert back to Office 365 2013? 

I am surprised Microsoft launched Office 365 2016 with this major issue on Excel.  

I have a particularly large spreadsheet, with macros, references across different worksheets in it, etc. About 11Mb in size. It also uses iteration to converge to solutions in some parts, with 6000 iterations (it's a Monte Carlo run). I have a desktop computer equipped with Windows 7. My copy of Office97 would not load on this 64 bit build of 7, so I run it on a XP virtual disk, ON THE EXACT SAME HARDWARE. Office 365 I subscribed to a couple of weeks ago, and run it on Windows 7 Ultimate.

In XP, this workbook takes about 15 seconds to run.  In Office 365, it's 75 seconds, but before you can even get going, you have to go into Resource Monitor and clear the wait-chain for some printing polling item. What a pain!  (I also have a Surface Pro 3 (i3) with Office 365 on Windows 10, and you have to do the exact same clearing of the printer wait-chain item to make it work, too, and it takes equally long to run. That is not a true apples-to-apples comparison since it is a different machine, but is more evidence to me that there is something intrinsically screwed up in Excel 2016.)  I can put the following line at the beginning of the code in the workbook, but it doesn't seem to help with speed:

Application.PrintCommunication = False

Anyway, I think instead of making all these peripheral suggestions Microsoft makes that just obfuscate the point (reminds me of the techniques used by car dealer service managers to avoid doing anything to fix your defective car), I hope Microsoft take the growing evidence of poorer performance (and more importantly, our dissatisfaction with it) and fixes Excel. From my admittedly unscientific comparison, Excel 2016 takes 5 times as long to do the exact same computation, on the exact same machine, as Excel97. Is this just a ploy to make us all buy new, even more powerful computers, just to keep the status quo? All the shiny baubles and fancy graphics can go away as far as I am concerned, if that is part of the issue, especially that cumbersome ribbon. (Guess which version of Excel I use when I really need to get something done!)

Dave

I have to agree totally, the performance of Excel in 2016 is abysmal, just upgraded from previous version, BIG MISTAKE, will be asking for a refund and reverting back to Office 2010, it worked fine.

Icing on the cake is that some of the templates freeze Excel 2016, task manager is the only route out!.

Thanks MS, perhaps you might find time to fix the grief?

Looks like once my business commitments are over later this year I will ditch this fiasco and go SOLELY Mac, was aiming to get another Win machine however, having found Win10 slower and less stable than Win 7 and now this......

JC