Ugrade to M4 Pro benefical for Excel?

[ngel22]

Hello all,

I'm working with large Excel files containing around 300MB and over half a million rows and around 80 columns. I'm currently on the M2 Air (24GB Ram, 512GB SSD), and opening a file of that size takes around 1 minute. Whenever I work inside those files, I often get that spinning wheel whenever I do an action, such as applying formulas or filtering the data.

My question is, if I upgrade to the Macbook Pro M4 Pro Chip (12 Core CPU - 16 Core GPU, 48GB Ram, 1TB SSD), would that make a big difference? And if so, how much would the difference be?

I'm looking for answers with real life evidence, ideally if some of you work with similar large files and own those M4 Pro machines with the specifications mentioned above. Would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

 

[TallManNY]

Hopefully someone will chime in that has your machine and workflow (I have an M2 Pro machine and my excel files are more like 30MB). I can however point out that Excel mainly relies on single core CPU. The M4 chip does have significantly faster single core speed than the M2. The good news is that you can get that advantage with the base M4. I'm skeptical that the M4 Pro chip will add much beyond the M4 chip and I'm confident that 48gb of RAM will do nothing compared to having 24gb of RAM.

You can test your current machine by opening Activity Monitor, opening and working with those beastly excel files, look at memory allocated to the Excel (you can also check the memory pressure during your workflow, but I'm going to guess it is pretty much always green; 300MB excel files are large, but also small compared to RAM measured in GBs) and pull up the window for CPU usage. You should see not that much RAM allocated to Excel and when you work with and iterate your Excel file you should see a CPU core spike to full speed. If for some reason you see all your CPU cores spiking, then the M4 Pro chip will help. But even in that case, the difference between the M4 chip and the M4 Pro chip is mainly in GPUs.

 

[dukebound85]

Is excel the right tool for the job? Is there a reason you are not using a database program or working in a coding environment?

 

[hovscorpion12]

if I upgrade to the Macbook Pro M4 Pro Chip (12 Core CPU - 16 Core GPU, 48GB Ram, 1TB SSD), would that make a big difference?

I don't have any excel files to compare. but i can say the M4 Pro will be miles fast in comparison.

#1. Your getting a ~50+ CPU gains
#2. Dual fans.

The M4 Pro configuration will pure dominate.

 

[ChrisA]

Is excel the right tool for the job? Is there a reason you are not using a database program or working in a coding environment?

If it is the only tool he knows, it must be the right tool. That is the problem, it would take weeks or even months to come up to speed with a tool that would save some minutes every day.