Make Excel Work Harder by Increasing the Thread Count

Sometimes when running a complex formula in Excel for a lot of data, you'll get an error message indicating that Excel ran of resources.

If this happens, note that you can improve the performance of Excel and possibly successfully run the formula for your full data set by increasing the number of threads that Excel is using.

Computers use schedulers to assign resources to complete tasks. The smallest sets of instructions that the scheduler can manage is a thread, but a process - the instance of a program - can use multiple threads.

In order to confirm that you're getting as much juice out of Excel as your computer can give, increase the thread settings. Go to File . . . Options . . . Advanced . . . and scroll down to the Formulas section. Here you can set a specific number of threads or simply select the radial button that uses all available processors.