Unsurprisingly, the design of the spreadsheet will have a direct impact on the size of any performance increase. In general, the more processors, the better the performance improvement. Excel 12 can take advantage of as many processors (or cores, which to Excel appear as processors) as there are on a machine вЂ“ when Excel loads a workbook, it asks the operating system how many processors are available, and it creates a thread for each processor. The net effect is that a given spreadsheet finishes calculating in less time, improving ExcelГўв‚¬в„ўs overall calculation performance. In a nutshell, this feature enables Excel to spot formulas that can be calculated concurrently, and then run those formulas on multiple processors simultaneously. Also note that our developers refer to this as MTR, or multi-threaded recalculation, but since most customers use the word calculation, I have decided to go that route for this post.) (Note Гўв‚¬вЂњ this is another working name, not a final name. The investigation turned out to be promising, so we continued the work, and the result is a very exciting feature that we refer to as multi-threaded calculation, or MTC. When planning Excel 12, we started a small investigation to look at different ways we could make Excel calculate faster on computers that had multi-processor or dual-core chips. To a large number of customers, ExcelГўв‚¬в„ўs calculation speed is extremely important Гўв‚¬вЂњ perhaps the most important Гўв‚¬Е“featureГўв‚¬ we ship. I thought I would take a brief break from tables to summarize that work and to see if any readers are interested in beta testing this feature.

One of the things I mentioned in my overview of Excel 12 post in September was that we had done some work to speed up calculation on modern hardware (multi-processor or dual-core chips).

Microsoft excel 2011 multithread