Hi Excel experts,
Firstly let me say that Excel is an amazing product that I use every day of my working life. However, because I use it so heavily I do run into limits, which I guess are more related to the hardware than the software.
Let me give you an example. I have a dozen or more large workbooks. Each of these Workbooks has a footprint in RAM of about 1gb, and probably contains 1 million + calculations. The books are divided into 12 Worksheets, each of which contains about 100,000 calculations. Each worksheet is independent of all others. Each Workbook takes about 90 seconds to open and 10 seconds to recalculate (much improved with Windows 10).
At this size, and with my hardware, the Workbooks are stable and reliable. Excel appears to be distributing the load well across the four cores.
(At present I use a reasonably hi-end desktop, 2 x Dual core i7 processors, 16gb of RAM).
If I go beyond 15 Worksheets/Workbook i.e. 1.5gb and 1.5 million calculations, I presume I reach the limits of my hardware because the books become unstable and start to crash regularly.
My questions is this:
I would like to double the size of my Workbooks. In the experience of the Excel team, if I were to specify for example, a Dual Processor/12 core machine i.e. 24 cores total, would Excel be able to take advantage of all those cores, or are there limits? Would each core be able to process individual Worksheets. I don't mind spending the money to take advantage of Excel, but I don't want to waste money!
Any thoughts appreciated.
Marcus
