At the very end of 2008, Microsoft finally admitted to something Excel users had long suspected … that adding a lot of shapes to a worksheet can greatly affect Excel’s performance.
At the very end of 2008, Microsoft finally admitted to something Excel 2007 users had long suspected … that adding a lot of shapes to a worksheet can greatly affect Excel’s performance.
If you use a lot of shapes then you might consider applying for the Excel hotfix patch dated 16 December 2008 and then adding a new registry entry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoft Office12.0ExcelOptions
a DWORD value called EnableFastTxLink with an initial value of 1.
Details of the registry change is here.
Unless this is a pressing problem for you, it’s probably not worth applying the hotfix. Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is coming in 2009 and it will presumably contain this fix.
According to Microsoft, this problem only applies to Excel 2007.
While it’s nice to see this hotfix (albeit late) the Microsoft documentation is typically lacking:
- How many shapes is ‘many’. How many shapes are required before an Excel worksheet starts slowing down? While there might not be an exact number, surely Microsoft could give some guidance to help users? Or is that detail embarrassingly low to be revealed?
- The hotfix patch was released on 20 December 2008 (it’s officially dated 16 Dec) but the patch information doesn’t include the important registry entry that’s necessary to activate the fix. It was only ten days later that Microsoft published the registry entry details that are essential for the hotfix to work. There’s no link from the hotfix KB article to the separate article with the registry info.
