How to stop Excel from automatically checking Workbook performance?

Question

Performance check??

The Excel sheet is the way I want it to look and don't want to change it for better performance. I just want Excel to stop prompting me.

Every time I open an Excel sheet, it wants me to do a performance check because of:

"Excess formatting and unneeded metadata cause large, slow workbooks. Check for improvements to performance"

So I find myself X-clicking away this message every time. Because there is no 'excess' of formatting. The Excel sheet simply is a nicely layouted workbook and we want it to be looking this way. We don't need Excel trying to outsmart us and giving this suggestion every time you open the workbook to remove information.

It is only very confusing for not-very-experienced users who also make use of my Excel sheet.

How and where can I set Excel in a way that is stops asking this unwanted question?

• The question mostly pops-up in the Web version of Office 365.
• I tried unchecking boxes in the performance check tool, in the desktop version, but to no result.

Would be lovely if someone has a workaround or knows which box needs to be un-checked.

And it would be awesome if a MS engineer helps giving priority to this problem, so that it can be switched of universally.

Answer 1

This thread shows that there are a significant number of people complaining about this. Unfortunately, this is only a user forum, we understand your problem, but we cannot do anything to fix it. Only the Excel developers can do this if they are instructed to do so.

As previously stated, this is simply a statistical problem, Microsoft must first recognize that this is a problem. Unfortunately, this is not so easy considering that more than 200,000 people work at Microsoft.

There is a feedback portal where you can cast your vote. There is already a feed on this topic, unfortunately with very few votes. I'm sure if we get as many votes as this post has been viewed, then Microsoft will react.

Anyone reading this, please follow these steps:

Click on this link:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/89bb523d-b197-ef11-95f6-0022484d7a88

1. Sign in
2. Click the Vote button

@HanzieV:

If you mark this reply as answer, it will be the first to appear when someone views this thread. I hope we can encourage as many people as possible to draw Microsoft's attention to this problem. Unfortunately, this is all we can do for you.

Andreas.

Answer 2

That was exactly my thought!

It doesn't prove a thing that people use the button and then make the assumption they like it.

Maybe they are crying in their beds right now because all their hard work is destroyed and they lack the knowledge to revert the change.

Answer 3

Thank you Prash (and other MSFT professionals) for acknowledging the issue.
I appreciate that.

Please allow me to chip in some cents regarding the points you make:

Regarding 1: users being unaware of formatting cells with no data and accumulating over time: I would say, that is a typical situation of 'normal' people suffering under ignorant people pretending to know what they are doing.
Let those people suffer from bad performance of their Excel sheets, then maybe they come to a good conclusion to borrow the book "Excel for dummies".

Regarding 2: the tens of thousands of cells & optimising & performance pain.

Err... in my case - where this whole thread started with - it is not exxessive tens-of-thousands. It's probably 8 or 9 sheets. Each sheet having a yearly, weekend-only calendar, so maybe some 130 rows. And each sheet on average has some 10-15 columns. I may get to 15k-20k cells, with formatting. But then the formatting is super simple: some colours, some simple formula's.
I have never experienced any performance pain. Not in the web-environment, (thank you MSFT for a reliable experience) and also not offline when working on my own laptop.

And your data may show the use of the optimisation button, but with that you cannot monitor how happy people are. The fact that they leave optimisation 'on' may be for the reason that they don't know how to revert the change. Have you considered that there may be a ton of highly frustrated users out there, because MSFT ruined their Excel sheet?

Anyway, I think the outcry from all 417 people in this thread is still loud and clear. Please give the designer of the Excel sheet a button to switch of the optimisation suggestion, to prevent not-very-experienced users accidentally messing up Excel sheets.

All the best Prash, to make this strong suggestion heard with your colleagues and superiors, so that this thread can be solved :-)

Cheers,

Answer 4

Please count me among those who are frustrated by not being able to disable this notification. I'm experiencing no performance issues with my file, but the notice reappears every time I open it. Please make it stop.

Answer 5

Prash, thanks for your response.

I have a question:

• What counts as "Excessive" and what counts as "Unintended"?
  • Every cell in a workbook contains some formatting.
  • There's a font (with all its associated subsettings like bold, underline, strikethrough, etc), a data type, a cell color (even if it contains no color that is still a choice that must be stored in some way).
  • So why does changing, say, the Date format or the Font or even the color count as formatting more than the default settings?
• ...Is it perhaps because Excel only stores exceptions to the default settings?

... and a couple comments on some fundamentally flawed thinking behind this "helpful" feature:

• I have used that optimizer and it absolutely trashed my workbook. I did not expect that. I had to close quickly without saving and revert to the last saved version. It shocked me how bad my workbook looked.
• You (MSFT) are optimizing on speed alone but ignoring a million other human factors that you know nothing about.
  • The workbook may gain a few milliseconds - or even whole seconds - in raw speed but at the expense of ruining the entire usability of the workbook
  • This can actually decrease performance of the people and organizations using the workbook in ways you cannot track or understand and which will almost never be reported
  • So when we design these workbooks, WE the Users decide whether our changes are worth the performance hit
  • ...and the performance hit is often measure in milliseconds or, at worst, seconds anyway
• It is not up to MSFT to decide for the user what is "Excessive" or "Unintended"
  • 'Excess' and 'Intent' vary almost infinitely by user and use case

I do look forward to being able to disable the performance checking at the user level and also at the workbook level. That is to say I don't want to disable performance checking on MY machine/instance only to send my hard work to someone else and have them performance check it into oblivion by mistake.