Will Excel for Mac 2016 utilize multiple cores on Mac?

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carol wimsatt shared this idea · August 24, 2015 · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →

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AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · January 22, 2018

Excel for Mac now has multi-threaded calculation, as of the release of version 16.9 on 18-Jan-2018. To update, go to Help > Check for updates. Thanks for all of your comments and support for this feature.

As mentioned in earlier comments, if you encounter any issues, please send the details to us by clicking the smiley-face button in the top right corner of the Excel window.

Thanks – Steve K [MS Excel]

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AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · January 11, 2018

Hi Everyone – thanks for all the comments about multi-threaded recalculation. If you have examples where you haven’t noticed the increase that you expected, then please send feedback by clicking the smiley-face button near the top corner of the Excel window. If you include your email address, then we can respond back and hopefully get a copy of the workbook that shows the issue so we can investigate.

If you have other issues that are not related to multi-threaded calculations, please send in feedback in the same way rather than commenting on those issues in this thread.

Thanks – Steve K [Microsoft Excel]

info needed ·

AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · November 16, 2017

Hi All –
We would love it if you can test out multi-threaded calculation in Excel for Mac, and send us any feedback about it. To test it, you need to opt into the Insiders program and get the “Fast” updates. You can do this by going to the Help menu and choosing Check for Updates. You need to update to Excel version 16.8 (171111).

If you find any issues, please use the smiley-face button in the top corner of the Excel window to send in your feedback.

How to test multi-threaded calculation:
The calculation mode gets set by the first workbook you open or create after you launch Excel. Multi-threaded calculations will not be enabled if the first workbook you open was last saved by Excel v15.x for Mac. You can enable multi-threaded calculations by using Windows Excel to save a workbook with multi-threaded calculations enabled. If that workbook is the first one you open on Excel for Mac (16.8 171111), then multi-threaded calculation should be enabled, and it will also be enabled for other workbooks that you open in that same session of Excel. It may also be enabled if you start Excel and then create a new workbook prior to opening an existing workbook, but we are still working to resolve an issue that may prevent this from working.

If you have a sense or know how long it has typically taken to calculate a given workbook, then you can run the same workbooks and see whether the multi-threaded calculation is faster or not. You could also compare the calculation time between Excel on Mac and Windows. There are some cases where multi-threaded calculation is not faster, but in most cases it will be faster.

Thanks,
Steve K
Microsoft Excel

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AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · September 06, 2017

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AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · March 24, 2017

Thanks to everyone for your feedback on this topic. We understand that performance needs to be improved and we have it as one of the important priorities for Excel on Mac. We have a plan for this, including utilizing multiple cores for calculation. Introducing this feature is not a simple matter, so the timeline for delivering it is still to be determined. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to be available in 2017.

Thanks,
Steve [MS Excel]

Accepting Votes ·

AdminExcel Team [MSFT] (Product Owner, Office.com) responded · November 06, 2015

Thanks for the post carol. Like Dan mentioned in the comments, we’ve got a lot to do and more votes helps us prioritize, so keep them coming if this is something that’s one of the most important for you.

Thanks,
John [MS XL]

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