Making excel faster / alternative to excel for making quick calculations ?

Question

I have built a trading model in excel which will take real-time data and perform various calculations. I therefore need excel to be as quick as possible.

I've recently bought a Macbook pro and am quite disappointed because using excel is really slow.

Please could somebody tell me anyways I can make excel faster or any alternatives for performing my calculations as quickly as possible.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi,

There may be things you can do to optimize your model.

There is a usenet newsgroup devoted to Mac Excel. If you don't have a news reader program configured you can get too it via Google and by the Microsoft web site (see link below).

When you post, be specific. Mention specific formulas or actions that you think could be the bottle neck.

-Jim

Answer 2

I suspect that you problem is mainly due to the fact that Excel hasn't been made native to the new Intel processors, yet. I don't own a Mac, but I did try Excel on several Macs at an Apple store this summer. It was very disappointing.

With that said, you might take a look at the site listed in the source list for some general calculation speed tips.

Answer 3

Enter your start date in a cell, say A1. Make sure this is entered correctly as a date which Excel recognises. If you are in the USA this would be something like 07/25/10 In Europe:- 25/07/10 You can now force Excel to do a calculation every 2 weeks. For instance, say you have a series of payments in B2 to B10, you could sum those payments every 14 days in B1:- =IF(MOD(DATEDIF($A$1, TODAY(),"d"),14)=0, SUM(B2:B10),"") (remove the spaces from this formula, and paste it into cell B1).