Microsoft Word 2008 slow?

it ran slow on my macbook pro also.. i think it's the program itself
the old 2004 one runs wayyy faster

I went to the Apple Store Saturday and played with Office 2008 on a nice MBP. It was pretty slick, till it crashed after about 30 seconds of usage--I was flipping through templates and it just got confused and died. I expect it will improve with a "service pack" MS is famous for.

I didn't find it particularly slow, but not really noticeably faster than Office 2004 in emulation, which is a little sad. Again, the app is pretty tolerable, but I wish they would make a nice lightweight editing program that was fast, rather than "taking advantage of the latest computer speeds" and making it even more of a resource hog. Oh well.

Maybe I'm not sensitive to delays when typing, but I've used word '08 a few time on my MBA and haven't noticed any delays.

It is slow for me (and "crashy") but if you search around - there's a ton of complaints about how slow it is - not an MBA issue. Reviews have also be criticizing it for lack of speed increases with the new version.

Mark

Same here, I use iWork which is really fast however I use Office 2008 for compatibility sometimes. Launch times for Office 2008 are awful slow especially on Word. The Windows version (2007) launches the suite almost instantly, hmm, I wonder why??? I hate Microsoft. They just want to keep Mac users at home like a dutiful wife and not in the business world.

Microsoft should be careful. It risks alienating a bunch of users who might make a mass exodus to NeoOffice, Open Office, or a similar free Office suite.

Mine runs much faster than the 2004 version. I actually really like it. Runs well on both my 2.0 Ghz iMac and 2.15 Ghz MacBook Pro. I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all but they did a good job with Mac Office 2008 in my opinion.

southerndoc said:

Microsoft should be careful. It risks alienating a bunch of users who might make a mass exodus to NeoOffice, Open Office, or a similar free Office suite.

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Microsoft could care less about the Mac community. I spoke to one of the managers on the design team at Macworld about the missing VB Macros support and she said it was due to Apple switching over to Intel and Microsoft ran short on time so in order to get it out in time for Macworld they could not include it.
That's such BS because there are a lot of new (Mac Only) things in Office 2008 that many people don't need like the Expression Media Pack. They had time to make that but not include VB Macros support? We need this for compatibility with the Windows version.
Sometimes I could just smack Bill Gates

HLdan said:

Microsoft could care less about the Mac community. I spoke to one of the managers on the design team at Macworld about the missing VB Macros support and she said it was due to Apple switching over to Intel and Microsoft ran short on time so in order to get it out in time for Macworld they could not include it.
That's such BS because there are a lot of new (Mac Only) things in Office 2008 that many people don't need like the Expression Media Pack. They had time to make that but not include VB Macros support? We need this for compatibility with the Windows version.
Sometimes I could just smack Bill Gates

Click to expand...

Bill Gates has little to do with it anymore. The VB stuff is not so huge, I am glad they replaced it with AppleScript.

I don't think 2008 is as big a problem for MS as 2007--It's their Windows users they should be afraid of alienating.

As for 2008, I thought the UI design was very nice by comparison with 2007 and 2004. I am hoping they will correct some of the performance issues and stability issues in the relatively near future. Let's not forget that Leopard itself isn't necessarily all that stable yet, though it is performing well.

Office 2008 slow

My Office 2008 is very slow to open. It usually takes at least 30 seconds to completely open. It isn't just Word. Excel has the same problem. I thought it was supposed to be faster now that it is Universal.

So it is universally slower now? Microsoft is strange. I wish Microsoft would switch their Windows Vista platform to PowerPC G4's so their failure is complete.

my office 2008 crashed every time i do a spell/grammar check. Super annoying. Ive actually gone back to office 04 even though its a bit slower, its more reliable, for the time being at least. Good thing i didnt actually pay for office 08.

I've installed Office for Mac 2008 but so far I have yet to really test out any of the apps as i keep using iWork instead. I figured I will use it only when people send me a .doc or .xls. or .ppt file, which technically I can open in iWork. But for quality assurance purpose I rather work in Office to be safe, especially Powerpoint. A lot of the fancy stuff does not translate into the Windows version at all- i.e. drop shadows in Office for Mac 2004 does not look anywhere near how it should look in Windows.

ViperrepiV said:

I just installed microsoft word....it is a little slow...i.e. the typing shows up a split second after i type, instead of instantaneous...I think because of the spelling/grammar checking. anyone else witness this?

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I'm not sure why you're getting the typing lag. I had this problem with Office 2004 (on my Core Duo MacBook), but Office 2008 is smooth as silk when I type. it does take awhile to open initially, but after that no probs...yet

S-l-o-w

We were doing a comparison on our Mac Pro between Word 2004 and Word 2008. We have a 100 page file with one misspelled word at the very end. Word 2004 finds it in 5 sec. Word 2008 takes 21 sec. Also, when we first open the file, Word 2008 takes 13 seconds to cache the document before we can go to the last page. Word 2004? No delay.

I'm not planning to put Office 2008 on my MacBook Air. I might put Office 2004 on or iWork Pages or just use TextEdit.

Slow

I just tried office 208 on my MBP 2.4 running 10.5.2. I did a custom install of just word and excel. It is so slow it is unusable. I have been using office X and it is much faster. Am I missing something or what?

I've started using Google Docs to actually write my papers, and Pages for editing and layout.

Then again, I'm just writing college papers and I have free wireless internet where ever I go.

I'm actually wondering if the ridiculously low load speed on the Office 2008 Suite Applications has something to do with font activation.

I run Suitcase on my MacBookPro (don't all creatives?) and I notice that when Word 2008 is attempting to load (it takes it over a minute and a half on my machine - which has over 4000 fonts stored on it) Suitcase pops up a cautionary error which tells me that I have a font that 'might' be corrupt... When I check the error dialog to see which font it is (always the same one) it is listing a font in a directory that Suitcase has NOT been given to manage... in fact, it is a font in a directory which contains nothing but copied data from an old machine that I sent off for repair a while ago, and have not had time to reinstate yet. So something in Word is causing it to push Suitcase into activating fonts that I've never told Suitcase even exist.

No other application does this.

Right now Suitcase runs a 'standard' set of System fonts.

Now... I also noticed this, which reinforces my view on this...

When Word DOES eventually load, and the load time is something akind to what I might expect if an application were trying to load 4000+ typefaces... I can click ANY of the menus in Word 2008 and they come up straight away... the Word 2008 FONT menu, however, will not highlight immediately and just the act of hovering over it causes the little Apple ticking clock "I'm thinking about doing what you've asked..." icon as the mouse pointer... It takes in excess of 20 seconds for this menu to load and appear, AND I've got WYSIWYG font face menu display turned OFF, and Word has gained access to FAR MORE fonts than are activated in Suitcase or resident in the System Font folder...

This would appear to be the root of the problem... Office is cacheing more fonts than the system is offering as being 'activated'...

Office 2008

Ya Im not impressed with anything 2008. I switched to Open Office and I LOVE it. So far everything is 100% compatible and it hasnt crashed on me either.

OK... a bit more...

Between them, Office and Apple's Font Book appear to have taken ALL the fonts on the computer, and inserted them into the System>Fonts folder.

So when Word activates, it is literally loading everything that Font Book has seen - and moved - by way of fonts.

I can find no way to deactivate or uninstall FontBook so that only Suitcase is in control...

Working on using my machine as a test solution to this hunch...

It seems that whenever Suitcase has loaded a font, FontBook has recognised it and somehow felt the need to keep it permanently in the System Fonts directory...

Theory confirmed, resolution effected...

Right...

Here's how I fixed this problem, and bear in mind, Excel took over a minute to load before hand... Word took a minute and a half...

I use Suitcase, so in FontBook I deactivated EVERY option in the Preferences pertaining to 'automatic' activation. Now Suitcase controls ALL my fonts.

I moved all my Suitcase controlled fonts to a directory which was NOT named 'Fonts' (it was before) and called it instead 'Font Collections'

I deleted all my former font sets in suitcase and reloaded them from the new 'Font Collections' directory.

I went in to User>Library>Fonts and deleted every swine font in there, noticing that there were over 1400 that should NOT have been there (it appears to have been using FontBook which caused them to move there)...

Then I restarted the computer.

I did not open any more font applications, just let Suitcase do it's work with the basic 'system' font set from the computer system root directory and...

Word2008 loaded in less than 5-7 seconds. Excel loaded in 3 seconds.

Hopefully using Suitcase for all font management will KEEP the problem sorted, but until I prove otherwise, I'm as happy as a pig in mud because Office 2008 runs faster on my Mac than it does on my PC (which is the way it should be)...

I think if you start looking logically at fonts and how they are activated on your Mac, you'll be close to chasing a solution like I have...

I don't understand this - my office 2008 works perfectly, and is much faster than 2004 - not that I have complaints about that, I just wonder why some people are having problems and some arn't