Greg L writes with another viewpoint on the great ” Office 32 vs 64-bit debate”
” 64-bit Office isn’t compatible with the Common Controls. A 64-bit version of the Common Controls may never happen. Add-ins and macros that use them won’t work. When Excel 2010 came out, I was on a contract at Amazon, automating spreadsheets used by vendors to upload products to sell on Amazon. I had used the progress bar from Common Controls. To ensure compatibility with 64-bit Excel, I had to remove it and roll my own progress bar control. Next, about a zillion ActiveX controls were made for office with 32-bit COM VB. Most of them are abandonware by now. They won’t work on 64-bit Excel. Finally, there are gobs upon gobs of abandonware Excel add-ins and macros in use today. Many of them make 32-bit Windows API calls or use 32-bit libraries or controls. 64-bit Excel is great for huge files that expand to make Excel use more than 2GB. I’ve had two projects like that. Without 64-bit Excel, those projects would require making the source files — they were database extracts — smaller, or streaming them in to Excel with the Input function and working with the data piecemeal. Running 32-bit Excel on 64-bit Windows with at least 4GB and preferably 8GB or more can be a big improvement since 64-bit Windows can give each 32-bit program 2GB, where 32-bit Windows slices up 2GB among them all. If you can show that 64-bit Excel is substantially faster than 32-bit Excel on 64-bit Windows with the same amount of RAM, then yes 64-bit Excel can be rightly recommended for general use. If not, then most users are better served, and will be for some time to come, by 32-bit Excel on 64-bit Windows with at least 4GB. “
It’s true that Microsoft itself hasn’t enabled compatibility for 64-bit Office. The lack of Common Controls is unforgivable – the company has had plenty of time to do it.
Greg also had some comments about the relative performance of 32 and 64-bit Office. He directed us to a 2009 Microsoft post which says that 64-bit Excel was the same or even slower than the 32-bit version.
“We have some tests that run a bit faster on 64-bit Excel, and other tests that run a bit slower on 64-bit Excel.“
Office Watch has been repeatedly told by Microsoft (and others with considerable expertise) that 64-bit Office is faster than the 32-bit version. That’s because of the translation layer required between 32-bit apps and the 64-bit OS.
However the difference is mostly only noticeable / applicable when working on large documents or worksheets. Those of us who use large worksheets, documents or presentations will get the most out of 64-bit Office.
All the comments from Microsoft assume that you’re working with a single document and application. In the real world, you’re more likely to have multiple programs and documents open. For example Outlook plus Word or Excel. That’s where the better 64-bit memory allocation would be a big benefit.
Greg continues …
“It seems to me that if the performance difference is due the WoW64 virtualization translation layer, the difference should be just as noticeable with small worksheets. It should be around the same percentage of a performance hit for any size sheet.
The fact that the difference is very noticeable with very large sheets, but not noticeable with small sheets, I think suggests that the difference is probably caused by something else. I suspect that the difference is that with very large sheets, as 32-bit Excel approaches or reaches it’s RAM limit, 32-bit Excel has to frequently overwrite items in RAM and then process and write them again as needed, where 64-bit Excel, having far more RAM to work with, can simply leave them in RAM and access them as needed.“
