I am wondering how long I should wait for the Perform Consumption Smoothing, type=Historical, to finish. I am well into 2 maybe 3 hours now. Actually I was originally trying to run this analysis on my MacBook Pro (2019 8 core i9 2.3 Ghz) in Excel ver 16.67 (aka Office 2021). It ran so long last night I finally had to go do something else and the machine slept. When I took it up this morning it seemed to be still going but I don't know how long it ran. Only way to stop it was to force quit Excel.
So, I switch to my Windows PC. It is a AMD Ryzen 2200G (four core 3 Ghz) using Excel from Office 365 (Microsoft 365). The same analysis has been running around 2.5+ hours now. I believe it still "working" because the NSDS changes. It changes every 12-14 seconds.
Wondering if this is really ever gonna finish and how long it could take. Also, is there a way to abort the job short of killing Excel?
Thanks,
David
So... the process I was waiting on in my previous ran for more than 24 hours before I finally killed Excel. I could see it was still working because I could see the NSDS number changing periodically. Seems likely it was in a loop of some sort, one, to run so long and, two, I started to recognize NSDS guesses I had seen before.
I stumbled on a clue to the issue I think. I had my discretionary expenses set high enough that the NSDS was going to have to be negative. The manual says this is a possible outcome but it seems the algorithm got stuck on my scenario. BTW, except for housing (real estate) and health I combine the rest of my expenses into a single entry under Discretionary Expenses. I figured out I had inadvertently combined some housing and tax numbers into this number so that it was excessively high. After fixing that I was, naturally, having better outcomes in general. AND, now CSA works in reasonable times. On my MacBook Pro, ~8 sec for Fixed, ~20 sec for MC and ~75 sec for Historical.
So, if you are having trouble with CSA try getting your starting expense assumptions lower.
/David
David,
The consumption smoothing process should take about a minute using the historical method. Apparently the algorithm wasn't able to converge on a solution for some reason. Even if the result is negative, it should still converge; however, from time to time I've seen cases where that doesn't occur. You can click the Escape key and that'll generally interrupt the process so that you don't have to kill Excel to get out of that loop.
Stuart
