Parallels causes Excel 2008 (Mac) slowness

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briang00

Junior Member
Parallels + WinXP causes Excel 2008 (Mac) slowness

I have a problem that I've only been able to reproduce when using Excel 2008 for Mac combined with Parallels.

When Parallels + Windows XP are not up and launched, Excel 2008 behaves normally. After launching Parallels (running Windows XP Pro as the guest OS), Excel 2008 becomes sluggish. Any sort of operation -- even basic entry of data in cells -- lags seconds behind. It is, in short, not useable.

Note that the sluggishness doesn't happen when Parallels is simply launched. It only occurs when the guest OS is booted. If I "pause" the guest OS in Parallels, Excel for Mac goes back to behaving just fine.

I have tried changing the memory settings in Parallels, to no avail. I am working on a 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro that has 4GB of RAM, so I'm certain that the machine isn't to blame either.

Has anyone experienced similar problems, and if so, have you identified a solution? Right now, this is pretty crippling for me....

Thanks.
 
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I continue to find this to be an issue. Has anyone discovered a good fix? John@parallels, I'm a little unclear from your last note what the "optimal" setting should be.

One thing I *have* found to work -- although it is very annoying -- is to delete all the Microsoft preferences. This gives you a while (sometimes hours, sometimes days) of happy operation of Excel before it starts acting up again.
 
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Changing memory allocation does not seem to have any effect. For reference, I have 4GB of RAM, and have tried allocating 512MB, 768MB, and 1GB to Parallels, with no differences.

I was able to isolate my "fix" to one specific preference file that, when removed and rebuilt, solves the problem for a while:
com.microsoft.office.plist
 
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bgstults said:
Changing memory allocation does not seem to have any effect. For reference, I have 4GB of RAM, and have tried allocating 512MB, 768MB, and 1GB to Parallels, with no differences.

I was able to isolate my "fix" to one specific preference file that, when removed and rebuilt, solves the problem for a while:
com.microsoft.office.plist
Click to expand...

Could you please clarify what operation was performed?
 
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For what it is worth

I am running a MacBook Pro 2.16MhZ C2D, 2 GB, 120GB machine on OSX 10.5.4 with Parallels build 5608. I run Microsoft Office for the Mac 2008 updated to V 12.1.2

I too have experienced the slowdown described by others on this thread with Excel, and have noted that the slowdown is not present when PD is not running.

This has not been a huge problem for me as I am a casual Excel user, but when I have needed to work with spreadsheets it is extremely annoying.
 
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Old Marine said:
I am running a MacBook Pro 2.16MhZ C2D, 2 GB, 120GB machine on OSX 10.5.4 with Parallels build 5608. I run Microsoft Office for the Mac 2008 updated to V 12.1.2

I too have experienced the slowdown described by others on this thread with Excel, and have noted that the slowdown is not present when PD is not running.

This has not been a huge problem for me as I am a casual Excel user, but when I have needed to work with spreadsheets it is extremely annoying.
Click to expand...

Did you try bgstults's solution?
 
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implemented the change as noted but not being a big Excel user have not had opportunity to test yet. Will try and do that over the next day or two and report back on whether this solved the problem/
 
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Solution: Turn "Recent Files" off in Excel

Hi there,

I've had the same problem and found the solution here:

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Mac/microsoft.public.mac.office.excel/2008-09/msg00309.html

Just turn off the "Recent Files" feature in Exce 2008l's general settings (turning it off for PowerPoint and Word also improves the speed there). It seems, that Parallels' file internal management system has speed problems accessing files that are inside the NTFS particition.
 
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Results of turning off recently viewed files

Mirko,

Turned off the "recently viewed" feature in preferences for Excel and Word, and the problem with slow application response for both went away.

Thanks for the follow up.
 
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