TM1 ribbon performance in 9.5.2

[lotsaram]

Does anyone know if the performance issues that have afflicted 9.4.1 and 9.5.1 when the TM1 ribbon is the active ribbon tab are fixed in 9.5.2?

(edited to be more specific about version.)

[Alan Kirk]

Does anyone know if the performance issues that have afflicted 9.4 when the TM1 ribbon is the active ribbon tab are fixed in 9.5?

Funny you should say that; I was commenting to some others about this just a few days ago. The short version is no, it hasn't. In 9.5.2 I was finding that it could take 4 or 5 seconds just to move from one cell to another. The reason is pretty obvious from this technote, which suggests disabling the ribbon:

Problem(Abstract)
Excel hangs or crashes with exception error message

...

This is partly caused by its new ribbons that replaces Excel 2003 menu and toolbars. Due to its new implementation on updating ribbon button status, it can sometimes (sic) cause significant slowdown if ribbon buttons need to be constantly updated. This is not a normal case for standalone Excel 2007 where ribbon buttons usually do not change status. But in Perspectives case, TM1 ribbons and buttons within it needs to be constantly updated when users change cell selections for instance. Depending on which cell users select, ribbon buttons need to enable or disable themselves, and sometimes need to update the tooltip content. For example, if a user selects a DBRW cell, certain spreading buttons are enabled, but if a user selects a non-DBRW cell, or select more than one cells, some spreading buttons are disabled.

When users experience this kind of problem, specially when changing cell selection, we typically ask users to try to temporarily disable TM1 ribbon and see if performance improves.

To put it more, ah, gently than I did originally, I'm not sure what they meant by "sometimes". Maybe they mean the times when the user doesn't have a turbocharged Core i7. Because if you're redrawing that much of the GUI with each and every movement, I fail to see why they didn't expect this to be a problem. I also fail to see why the ribbon icons "need" (sic) to update themselves in a context sensitive fashion, when the obvious alternative is to simply display a (clear) error dialog when a user selects an option which is out of context.

In addition to the slow speed, if you happen to hit the [Esc] key causing the code to break before it completes its vital task of redrawing the ribbon, you end up with a half-drawn ribbon with all of the icons but only a proportion of the captions in place.

The obvious workaround is to get off the tab and onto say the Home tab except on the occasions that you actually need the TM1 tab, though why you should need to do this when the design solution is obvious escapes me.

[lotsaram]

So that is a big fat NO then. Form past experience for whatever reason the ribbon performance issue is multiplied when perspectives is served up over Citrix (anyone have a technical explaination?)

Yes you can train (or at least inform) users to stay on the home tab and only have the TM1 tab active when needed. But when you have hundreds of occasional users that just doesn't fly. Basically this is just a support nightmare as it causes huge performance issues and untold user frustration and taints the tool. OK so we can create a client package and do the Citrix install without tm1pRibbonX.xlam, but why should the customer have to go to the trouble of doing this when this is a bug in the eyes of the user. Wake up IBM.

[Alan Kirk]

So that is a big fat NO then. Form past experience for whatever reason the ribbon performance issue is multiplied when perspectives is served up over Citrix (anyone have a technical explaination?)

I haven't tested it on Citrix but I'm happy to take your word for it. It's a bit of a guess on my part, but I don't think that screen redrawing is all the way off as the toolbar is refreshed, though I can't prove it. What may not be perceptible to the human eye will still be perceptible to Citrix so you'd have any redraw data flowing up and down the pipe to the Citrix server, which is obviously far slower than just flowing through the innards of a Core i3 notebook. As I said, it's just a guess but I wouldn't rate it as an impossibility.

Yes you can train (or at least inform) users to stay on the home tab and only have the TM1 tab active when needed. But when you have hundreds of occasional users that just doesn't fly. Basically this is just a support nightmare as it causes huge performance issues and untold user frustration and taints the tool. OK so we can create a client package and do the Citrix install without tm1pRibbonX.xlam, but why should the customer have to go to the trouble of doing this when this is a bug in the eyes of the user.

Agreed. I test current versions so that when or if I'm ready and able to deploy them, I know what to expect. But there's no way that I'd rate the ribbon tab as being "deployment-ready". If Santa were to bring me a new server and an upgrade licence and I went to 9.5.2 tomorrow... it would be with the Add-in tab icons only. There's no way I'd inflict the ribbon on end users in its current state.

[Paul Segal]

Just to resurrect this - I'm having the same ribbon descriptions disappearing issues running 10.2 on Excel 2010 as a published app on Citrix 6.5. Apart from the obvious of disabling the ribbon, is anyone else having this issue and/or have a fix?

Regards

Paul

[mattgoff]

Yes, serious issues for us on 10.2.2 FP1. We had our users disable it (by naming the file). No real functionality loss, and people were used to going through the Add-Ins tab anyway.

[Paul Segal]

Thanks Matt. Is that straight Excel or with Citrix?

[mattgoff]

Thanks Matt. Is that straight Excel or with Citrix?

Straight Excel, both via RDP/RemoteApp and natively installed. No Citrix.