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1.10. Getting Better Performance from Excel

Disponible en español: Conseguir un mayor rendimiento de Excel
Disponível em português: Obtendo o melhor desempenho do Excel

Applies to: @RISK and other Palisade add-ins to Excel

How much of the calculation time in my model is actually spent by Excel? Can I make my Excel worksheets calculate more efficiently?

The impact varies. @RISK (particularly RISK Optimizer), Evolver, PrecisionTree with linked trees, and TopRank are most affected by Excel calculation speed.

@RISK and TopRank recalculate all open workbooks ("Excel recalc") once per iteration.
PrecisionTree does a couple of Excel recalcs while analyzing the tree. With a linked tree, PrecisionTree also does an Excel recalc for each possible path through the tree (each end node).
Evolver does an Excel recalc once per trial.
StatTools does virtually all of its calculations outside of Excel, so tuning Excel will have little effect on the speed of its operations.
NeuralTools does virtually all of its calculations outside of Excel, so tuning Excel will have little effect on the speed of training or testing a network.

Microsoft has a number of suggestions for how to get better performance out of your Excel model:

Excel 2010 Performance: Tips for Optimizing Performance Obstructions (accessed 2015-04-10) gives many specific techniques for getting better performance out of your Excel model. Most of these apply to other versions of Excel as well as Excel 2010.
Excel 2010 Performance: Improving Calculation Performance (accessed 2015-04-10): See especially "Iteration Settings" and the large sections "Making Workbooks Calculate Faster" and "Finding and Prioritizing Calculation Obstructions".
Excel 2010 Performance: Performance and Limit Improvements (accessed 2015-04-10) also applies to Excel 2007 explicitly and Excel 2013 implicitly.

See also:

Last edited: 2018-01-30

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