Why is Numbers SO SLOW?!?

Question

Wow, I'm really thinking about switching back to Excel, which is like blasphemy for me. I only use Numbers for one spreadsheet. It's my personal budget. I have a tab for each account, and one tab where I enter reoccurring payments/credits. There is a debit column and a credit column in each where I enter transaction amounts, then a current balance (for all checked transactions), and a running balance. This is repeated for each account. Most of the tabs only have about 50 rows by 9 columns and one tab has about 350 rows by 9 columns. It only keeps one calendar year's worth of transactions as I create a new file for each year. The calculations are mostly addition, subtraction, sums and a lot of IF statements and a few ROUND functions.
There is a fair bit of cell linking going on between accounts and also with the one tab where the reoccurring transactions are entered, but nothing that it shouldn't be able to handle with ease. Been using this identical spreadsheet on Excel for many years and on much slower hardware. The problem is that it is dog slow to do almost anything that requires it to recalculate the spreadsheet. Dragging a row to change it's position takes 20-30 seconds and brings up the beach-ball. Checking off a transaction (which updates the current balance) takes 2-3 seconds. Entering, changing or deleting a transaction amount takes 12-13 seconds and usually brings up the beach-ball.
Is there some way to speed this thing up like forcing it to calculate to a lower number of decimal precision or something? It's mind-numbingly painful to use. Sure, I could start simplifying my spreadsheet by removing all the links, but that defeats the purpose of using a spreadsheet. My budget is a very dynamic tool, and I want the ability to change one thing and see how it's going to affect my finances 8 months from now. Again, this is something Excel handled with ease. No matter what I changed in Excel, it would recalculate and refresh almost instantly. I could handle a bit of a delay (say 2-3 seconds), but having the app become unresponsive every time I make a simple change is not acceptable.
I had the same problems in Tiger, and hoped that a clean install of Leopard would improve things, but unfortunately not. I'm up to date on all iWork and OS updates. My wife uses the same budget on her MacBook and she complains about the same issues. I've even recreated the file from scratch to make sure it wasn't some kind of corruption. Numbers just appears to be really inefficient with recalculating lots of cells.
I'd be happy to send Apple a copy of my spreadsheet so they could do performance testing/tuning for the next Numbers update. The way it is, I can't see anyone using Numbers for anything even remotely complex.

Answer 1

This is just a stab in the dark, but as it is iWork, it is possible that one of the fixes for slow Pages may work. Here is the list I usually give for Pages users:
1. Do you have any PostScript Fonts installed? Some people have reported problems with some PostScript Fonts.
2. Do you have any missing fonts? When you open the document, does Pages complain that it cannot find one or several fonts?
3. Do you have corrupt fonts? Open FontBook, select all fonts and then File > Validate Fonts.
4. Corrupt pictures, songs and movies in your home folder's Movies, Music and Pictures folders can slow down the product through the Media Browser. AVI films in the Movie folder can slow things down, as QT usually cannot play them.
5. Go to View > Hide > Layout. For some reason the layout slows things down.
6. Don't view Thumbnails.
7. Use the Text Fit option "follow contour" instead of "follow a square" in the bottom section of the wrap inspector.
8. If an object is set to wrap, and a wrapped side squeezes out any possibility of text wrapping along that side - such as extending a text box to the margin, the extreme slowdown will occur. So don't.
9. Use as few objects as possible Fixed on Page. Instead use Moves with Text.
10. Reduce the resolution of your screen.
11. Reduce the number of colours of your screen.
12. Change your video card. (Yes, even the screen hardware may be the source of the problem.)
Just ignore any point that does not make any sense at all for you in Numbers.