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Which do you think will be faster at MS Office when running Windows?

  • 2x4 3.0Ghz Mac Pro 3,1

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    2

outonmybike

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 27, 2013
7
0
Dear Forum,

I apologize if this has already been answered, I searched the google-webs and this forum, but couldn't find an answer to my specific question.

The way that I understand it, when I run 2016 MS Office for Mac OSX on my MacBook Pro (2011, 15", quad core i7), it only uses one of my cores. Normally this isn't a problem, but I've recently been doing some heavy Excel work with some large formulas that take a while (60 minutes or more) to calculate. I've got Windows installed on a boot camp partition, so my question is, when I run Excel in Windows, but on a Mac, is it using all of my cores/processors, or is it still limited to one? Additionally, due to the large size of the data I've been trying to crunch, I've started using MS Access, which is only available in Windows.

The reason that I ask is because I have my MBP with a quad core i7, but I also have a Mac Pro (3,1 - 2008) with 2x4 3.0Ghz processors that also has Windows installed on a bootcamp partition, and I am wondering which computer will actually perform faster in MS Office programs when running Windows?

If, when I'm running MS Access or Excel on Windows, it uses all of my cores/processors, then the Mac Pro should be faster than the Macbook Pro (multi-core geekbench3 scores of ~11,500 vs ~8,000), but if it still only uses 1 core, then the MacBook Pro would theoretically be faster due to the fact that one of its cores is faster than a single one of the Mac Pro cores (~2300 vs ~1650 single core scores).

I realize this is probably trivial, and I could probably just open the same Excel file on both computers and time how long it takes each to run a large calculation, but I thought I'd check first to see if anybody on here had any insight into my life threatening dilemma that's been keeping me awake at night for the last week before running 30,000 INDEX MATCH formulas on 500,000 rows of data :)

Thanks for any info anyone is able to provide.
 
Last edited:

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,552
43,528
I don't think Excel on Windows is heavily threaded so it may not be faster in that sense, but I think Excel for windows runs better and is more efficient. To put it another way, Excel is a better product and you get a better experience in Windows vs. OS X.

As for Access, since MS doesn't provide an OS X version, the point is moot, it can only run in Windows.
 
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