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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Last time I used it I believe it just crashed when opening a large CSV file.

Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more performant and stable for me.

Are you using it on Apple Silicon? If so, then Rosetta is the reason why Excel are not performant on macOS. Office365 for macOS are using x86 code at the moment, Office team is rewriting Excel to work on Apple Silicon/ARM. They have a preview build out, I'm not sure when they will release the stable version. I recalled they said it should be release in Spring or Summer.

If you have Excel running, open the Activity Monitor and find the app in the list. Then look at "Kind" column, you will see "Intel" listed. So that's why Office365 are sluggish on it.

Running on a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip with 8 cores. The Excel code on windows got a lot more love than the mac code. Probably due to apple's OS and processor architecture changes over the last 20 years, whereas windows maintained great backwards compatibility the whole time.

The Office apps are now fully recompiled for Apple Silicon

Took me a while why Office is still using Intel code. Turns out they have "Open with Rosetta" enabled. I disabled Rosetta on those apps and it went to use Apple Silicon code. Now it is snappier than using Rosetta.

Thanks for letting me know!

It’s a pig for large spreadsheets on MacOS on either CPU arch.

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