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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that modern Excel forces the display to redraw too much. It's the only thing I can think of that would cause my 2018 MBP CPU to peg at 100% while (jankily) resizing the window on my external monitor unless I play games with the OS resolution settings to disable retina upscaling.

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As soon as you start to vary, accidentally or not, the heights of cells, you're in for a bad time.

Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.

That seems like a bug right? The drawing code might be highly optimized for equal height rows but resizing cells is quite common, I’m surprised they just punt on it.

IIRC redraw doesn't happen until the sort finishes, but I use Excel as little as I can get away with, so I don't have a recent memory to rely on. That said, at a guess, reordering rows of equal height (and otherwise with no non-default properties) is probably mostly just rearranging pointers - why bother keeping row index associations intact, when the only trait of any row is the values in its cells? - while reordering rows of varying height might involve a lot of copying, or otherwise significantly more complex shenanigans, to make sure data and row properties stay properly associated.

I'm not even talking about varying heights of cells, just resizing the window. It. jumps. and. jerks. and. crawls. and. chugs. Even if it's a fresh blank sheet. And the problem gets noticeably and rapidly worse the bigger the window is, so if I want to fullscreen a sheet on a big monitor...oof. It's like the application completely reconstructs the whole visual canvas from scratch any time you do anything, whether it makes sense or not.

This doesn't happen with any other application.

Hiding the ribbon makes a _huge_ difference. That's hilarious and awful.

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