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How do I improve Excel 2013 and Excel 2016 performance?

If you upgraded to Office / Excel 2013 or 2016 without upgrading your PC hardware, you probably noticed that Excel 2013/2016 seems slower than your previous version of Excel. In some cases, it may actually be MUCH slower (see below for a list of Ticker Toolkit™ operations that are slower in Excel 2013 / 2016).  If you don’t need to upgrade to Office / Excel 2013 or 2016 and you do have an older (more than a few years) PC or Laptop, you’ll probably appreciate the relative responsiveness of Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.  If you do need to upgrade to Office / Excel 2013 or 2016, there may be a couple of things that you can do to improve application performance.

  1. Make sure that you have downloaded and installed Microsoft’s recommended updates for Microsoft Windows and Office / Excel.
  2. Disable Office 2013 / 2016 animations (visual effects).  See below if you want to try this suggestion.
  3. Upgrade your PC to one with a more modern CPU and more memory

What Ticker Toolkit™ operations are slower in Excel 2013 / 2016 than they are in Excel 2010 and Excel 2007?

The following Ticker Toolkit™ operations may be noticeably slower in Excel 2013 / 2016 than they are in Excel 2010 and Excel 2007:

  1. Starting Ticker Toolkit™ when your workbook has many datasheets (the number of ticker symbols on each datasheet does not matter).
  2. Opening a Ticker Toolkit™ backup file (*.ttk) by clicking ‘Full Restore’ on the Control Panel.  For example, when you click ‘Full Restore’ to load an example workbook, the example workbook may load very slowly.  Once loaded from a Ticker Toolkit™ backup file, your stock workbook is responsive.
  3. Viewing, programming and clearing Preset stock search buttons on the Control Panel. For example, when you click on the ‘Program Preset’ button, you’ll notice a delay before Excel 2013 acknowledges your click.  Once programmed, Preset buttons are responsive.

For Advanced users only.  If you are not comfortable with editing your Windows Registry, do not attempt this operation.  Edit the Windows Registry at your own risk.

One way to speed things up a little is by disabling animations (visual effects).

To disable Office 2013 animations, do the following:

  1. Close Microsoft Office applications (including Excel)
  2. In the Windows Registry, navigate to
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
  3. Add DWORD “DisableAnimations”
  4. Set the DWORD value to 1 (“DisableAnimations”=dword:00000001)
  5. Reboot your PC

Office 2013 Animation Registry

 

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