Multi-threaded calculation to make Excel 12 much faster

To a large number of customers, Excel’s calculation speed is extremely important – perhaps the most important “feature” we ship. When planning Excel 12, we started a small investigation to look at different ways we could make Excel calculate faster on computers that had multi-processor or dual-core chips. The investigation turned out to be promising, so we continued the work, and the result is a very exciting feature that we refer to as multi-threaded calculation, or MTC. (Note – this is another working name, not a final name. Also note that our developers refer to this as MTR, or multi-threaded recalculation, but since most customers use the word calculation, I have decided to go that route for this post.)