I'm currently trying out Excel on Macbook Air M1 16/256, Office 365 version 2112 64-bit, run through Windows 11 Virtual Machine through Paralells.

Excel itself, as well as other basic apps in Windows 11, works very fast most of the time. However, problems start to appear when I load up bigger (30-200 MB) files filled with macros.

I can't share the macros for confidentiality reasons but there is nothing to suggest they were written badly. Speedtest for one macro which me and my colleagues use very often should give a result between 6 and 13 seconds on a fairly regular PC, whereas I'm getting 37 seconds.

I'd think the problem is somewhere within the graphics (maybe something with the fact that computer's native resolution is over 1920x1080). First off, most of the time within the sheets I see a regular Windows arrow cursor, instead of the plus cursor. It might change occasionally to the plus cursor but I can't see any pattern in it. If I hover the mouse over the lines between the columns/cells where I can change their width/height, I can change them but the cursor's shape doesn't change and it comes with a small lag, bigger than what I get at my usual Windows machine. Secondly, if I run a very simple macro which simply adds three values to three cells, my screen flashes for a short while, whereas I've never seen that on my regular PC.

Also most excel scrolling lags, blurry screen, parts of screen disappearing etc. issues I have found online seem to have some connection to computers with higher screen resolutions than full HD.

I've done all the things I could think of or found online, that is disable hardware graphics acceleration, optimise Excel for compability, turn animations off, change the excel.exe manifest file DPIaware settings to false, run the file in safe mode - all without effect.

The only thing which seems to be working was launching the file in Excel 2016 64-bit, where performance was fine, but I can't really use it because the sheet contains some functions which have been introduced only for newer versions of Excel.

I realise this post might look a bit weird in between posts mostly focusing on coding issues but I thought it would be a good place to throw it in as there should be many VBA heavy users here and maybe somebody has had similar problems. Any direction in which I could go to solve this problem would be appreciated.