Woman working on laptop in home office

Automatic recalculation optimization makes your active workbook more performant

Feature deep dive
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Hey, Insiders! My name is Prash Shirolkar and I’m a Product Manager on the Excel team. I’m thrilled to inform you of a new optimization in automatic recalculation. This improvement minimizes the chances of slowness or freezing in the active workbook (the one you are actively working in) when multiple workbooks are open. 

Automatic recalculation optimization

The introduction of the single document interface (SDI) in Excel 2013 made it possible for users to open and run multiple, unrelated workbooks in a single instance of Excel. Additionally, when using the Automatic Calculation mode, any of these workbooks has the potential to trigger a recalculation of all open workbooks, which increases the risk of slowing down the performance of the active workbook.

We are minimizing the risk of slowness and increasing performance by limiting the recalculation process to the active workbook and any of its interdependent workbooks.

NOTE: Workbooks with real-time streaming functionality (such as Realtime Data), as well as recalculation initiated either programmatically or manually by pressing the F9 key or selecting Formulas > Calculate Now are exceptions to this optimization. 

Ribbon with Formulas tab displayed and Calculate Now button highlighted

Availability

This feature is available to Insiders running:

  • Windows: Version 2208 (Build 15529.10000) or later
  • Mac: Version 16.64 (Build 22081401) or later

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.   

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.   

Feedback 

After you’ve had a chance to try the feature, please share your feedback by clicking Help > Feedback and letting us know what you think. 

Do you have an idea to make Excel better? We’d love to hear about it. Go to the Excel forum in Microsoft Feedback to submit your idea or vote for other ideas.