User productivity and the ability to focus on a task deteriorates as response time lengthens.Įxcel has two main calculation modes that let you control when calculation occurs:Īutomatic calculation - Formulas are automatically recalculated when you make a change. Poor calculation speed affects productivity and increases user error. By identifying, measuring, and then improving the calculation obstructions in your worksheets, you can speed up calculation. You can modify most slow-calculating worksheets to calculate tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster. However, the most important factor that influences Excel calculation speed is still the way your worksheet is designed and built.

Multithreaded calculation can substantially reduce worksheet calculation time. Recent Excel versions introduced several features to help you handle this capacity increase, such as the ability to use more than one processor at a time for calculations and common data set operations like refresh, sorting, and opening workbooks. Slow calculation and data manipulation tasks such as sorting and filtering make it more difficult for users to concentrate on the task at hand, and lack of concentration increases errors. With the introduction of the 'Big Grid' in Excel 2007, performance really matters. In earlier versions of Excel, many people created slow-calculating worksheets, and larger worksheets usually calculate more slowly than smaller ones. A single worksheet in Excel can now contain over 1,000 times as many cells as earlier versions. The 'Big Grid' of 1 million rows and 16,000 columns in Office Excel 2016, together with many other limit increases, greatly increases the size of worksheets that you can build compared to earlier versions of Excel. Applies to: Excel | Excel 2013 | Excel 2016 | VBA

Excel iterative function