64-bit or 32-bit Excel for large templates?

Hey Guys,

I work for a company the uses large excel built templates to generate financial statements and test accounts. The files are complex and often times take about 5 minutes to fully load in. The templates pull account balances from a 3rd party application. The template makes a multitude of calculations and, with the user's help, produces financial statements. One of the templates we use is about 7 mb.

Currently our office is using 32-bit Excel and all our laptops are 64-bit. Would we see an increase in load times and template functionality if we were using 64-bit Excel?

Thanks in advance!

Please don't try to draw special attention to your thread with asterisks - these and the word POLL have been removed from your thread title.

To answer your question we would need to know more about the nature of the template.

I think you are misguided making this a poll: you may get lots of responses, but no insights into why one might be better than the other.

Generally you want to avoid 64-bit Excel unless you really need for addressing in files that are extremely large and complex. In your title, how large is "large"?

It especially will cause compatibility hiccups for files with VBA. If your current files work with 32-bit then I don't think there would be any advantage to moving to 64-bit.

I'll second Jeff.
Stick with 32-bit, unless you really have compelling reason to move to 64-bit. 7MB isn't much and 32-bit should be able to handle it without issue, and you won't be gaining much from moving 64-bit.

I use 64-bit, but I need to pay special attention to adding code in VBA that handles API calls when I pass off workbook to coworkers (they use 32-bit).
Or to only hand off aggregated report rather than the workbook with large/complex data model (PowerPivot data model).

One good indication to move to 64-bit is when the memory usage is consistently hitting 4GB ceiling when you are working with dataset that's 500 - 700 MB + in size.
Oh, and to leap benefit, you should have 8GB RAM or more.

In a previous position I supported some of the biggest companies in the world with regards to Excel among other things. I would estimate also having helped 25,000 employees directly over the course of my time doing such work. In all of that time I came across exactly 2 instances in which a single user would need the 64 bit version of Excel.

In both cases the person was an engineer dealing with +500k rows per sheet across many sheets.

So my vote is 32 bit. 64 bit offers no speed advantage that I am aware of, it simply allows using a larger pool of RAM than the 32bit version (limited to 2GB RAM per instance). The 64 bit version allows for virtually as much RAM as the system has. The thing is, 99.9% of people will never push Excel to +2GB RAM. The extra RAM has nothing to do with speed, its just how much data can it store in memory to work with at one time.

Its also not uncommon for addins to only work with 32 bit (though more 3rd parties are starting to offer 64 bit versions of their addins), so compatibility is a concern too. VBA is another problem, as some code, especially calling API's, will need updating to work properly.

The risk is high and the reward is low basically. The only case I would recommend 64 bit is if you have files that hit the 2GB RAM limits of 32 bit.