Office 2004 vs Office v.X

[mckeek]

I just bought a nice shiny new PowerBook 1.33 (love it!) and need Office. I keep reading that 2004 is slower that its predecessor (typical MS behaviour) and the few added features are not worth the performance hit. Since I use only about 10% of the features in Office at work (on a PC) I am fishing for opinions - are the stories of 2004 being slow true, and if so, should I get tried and true V.X instead?

TIA,

- Kevin

[Chip NoVaMac]

If you can find a V.x version on the shelves, then you can get a free copy of the 2004 version. Then you can do tests for yourself.

[j_maddison]

I just bought a nice shiny new PowerBook 1.33 (love it!) and need Office. I keep reading that 2004 is slower that its predecessor (typical MS behaviour) and the few added features are not worth the performance hit. Since I use only about 10% of the features in Office at work (on a PC) I am fishing for opinions - are the stories of 2004 being slow true, and if so, should I get tried and true V.X instead?

TIA,

- Kevin

I've used both, and I'd say that if you dont use any of the new shiny features then buy the one that is the cheapest. I can't say for me there has been any benefit, like you i dont use many features apart from simple formulas in excel and basic word processing in word.

jay

[osprey76]

I haven't seen a performance problem with Office 2004 over v.X. However, I have to throw some caveats in there. I don't use Office to do large documents or spreadsheets (at home anyway, and my work computer is a PC.) So, I've rarely done anything with Office to tax the system. Also, not long before I bought Office 2004 I upgraded my Dual 450Mhz to a Dual 1300Mhz.

Anyway, my personal experience has been fine, but I've only done simple things in Excel and Word. Entourage I use extensively and I think it's running fine. I had to adjust my rules a smidgeon for my .Mac IMAP account and my Hotmail account. Now that I have, though, Entourage identifies spam, moves into the Junk Mail folder on the respective servers and only downloads my real email. I have never gotten more than 2 spam messages in one day, but it's nice to have even less to take care of.

[robotrenegade]

I just bought a nice shiny new PowerBook 1.33 (love it!) and need Office. I keep reading that 2004 is slower that its predecessor (typical MS behaviour) and the few added features are not worth the performance hit. Since I use only about 10% of the features in Office at work (on a PC) I am fishing for opinions - are the stories of 2004 being slow true, and if so, should I get tried and true V.X instead?

TIA,

- Kevin

I've used both and 2004 is slower as far as opening a app, but does that really matter? It slower doesn't mean is slow as takes 2min to open it.

[wowser]

I saw these tips to speed Word up a bit. I only tried the word count one, as I would rather keep the others as features. Still:

1. Disable Live Word Count (Preferences: View)
2. Disable Quartz Text Smoothing (Preferences: General)
3. Disable WYSIWYG font and style menus (Preferences: General)

[wordmunger]

Disable Quartz Text Smoothing (Preferences: General)

I've always had problems with MS Word in Mac OS X, especially with the software being able to keep up with my typing. So I tried your suggestions and found I'd already disabled Quartz Text Smoothing. Just for kicks, I enabled it to see if there was a big difference. Here's what I found:

1. The text looks WAY better. A huge difference.
2. It's FASTER than with Quartz Smoothing disabled.

So my recommendation, assuming your graphics card can handle Quartz, is to ENABLE text smoothing. MS Word is usable again!

[wowser]

Ah, that's bad news for me, then. I really can't stand the text lag, but have smoothing enabled.

[thequicksilver]

To be perfectly honest, 2004 is a good deal more sluggish than the not exactly stellar Office X. I'd get X were I in your shoes.