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MS Office 2011 version 14.01 is so slow it has screen lapses

C

Caribbean Mac

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 16, 2008
44
1
Dominican Republic
I have just installed MS Office 2011 in my MacBook and this is the slowest software I have seen since my MAC SE running DBase!

It is so slow that it has a 1 to 2 seconds screen reaction to main commands (open, save as, etc) :mad:

Why can MS do anything for MAC right?
 
Caribbean Mac said:
I have just installed MS Office 2011 in my MacBook and this is the slowest software I have seen since my MAC SE running DBase!

It is so slow that it has a 1 to 2 seconds screen reaction to main commands (open, save as, etc) :mad:

Why can MS do anything for MAC right?
Click to expand...

I am not experiencing any of these problems...

Make sure that you:
Have update OSX
Have indeed installed 14.0.1
You may need to reinstall Safari (yeah I know... sometimes there is an issue with some of Safari's system files and OFM 2011)

Which Mac are you using and how much ram do you have?
 
I have 10.6.4 and all updates installed, have opened Safari, and have MSO 14.01 and every time I open Word, Excel, PPT it takes up to 5 seconds for the screen to load the first time the content of the files

It is amazing how slow these new programs are under OSX Leopard

Another downgrade from MS as usual! :mad:
 
I have an unibody macbook (2 ghz, 2 gig ram) (10.6.5 and everything is up to date) and office 2011 (last update) is terrible slow! Is there something I can do to speed it up?
 
speedfreak007 said:
I have an unibody macbook (2 ghz, 2 gig ram) (10.6.5 and everything is up to date) and office 2011 (last update) is terrible slow! Is there something I can do to speed it up?
Click to expand...
Uninstall it, sell it and buy iWork.

Seriously, it's a mystery to me on how people get Microsoft products running well on Macs. I had Office 2008. And it ran like utter poo. Filled my home folder full of rubbish, buggy, slow and pretty much dire. They had it at college, and it was just as bad.

I got iWork and everything was fine. But just out of curiosity, I downloaded an illegal copy of 2011 when it was released, just to see if it was worth investing in. What a waste of my download limit that was. It's just as bad and 10x more complicated with the whole 'ribbon' thing. The only advantage was that the new MSN had webcam support. Not that mattered to me as I switched to skype and AIM ages ago.

Seriously... I don't see how anyone can abide to the junk Microsoft release for Mac.
 
I hate it too, but I need if for school since iWork isn't 100% compatible with the .doc(x) formats. And Pages does not have some of the basic functions in Word. It just can't do as much as Word.

I probably have to switch to Latex to make my scientific reports, but I'm too lazy to learn it properly :)
 
roadbloc said:
Uninstall it, sell it and buy iWork.

Seriously, it's a mystery to me on how people get Microsoft products running well on Macs. I had Office 2008. And it ran like utter poo. Filled my home folder full of rubbish, buggy, slow and pretty much dire. They had it at college, and it was just as bad.

I got iWork and everything was fine. But just out of curiosity, I downloaded an illegal copy of 2011 when it was released, just to see if it was worth investing in. What a waste of my download limit that was. It's just as bad and 10x more complicated with the whole 'ribbon' thing. The only advantage was that the new MSN had webcam support. Not that mattered to me as I switched to skype and AIM ages ago.

Seriously... I don't see how anyone can abide to the junk Microsoft release for Mac.
Click to expand...

Office for Windows isn't much better. MS needs to stop with the extra features for one release and do a serious fix. We always had users submitting work orders for the IT department for fixing corrupt PST files, or the mysterious bug where office items take literaly 10 minutes to open (I forget what causes that I've been out of desktop for awhile), or normal.dot missing, or any number of other 3904820843982 things that goes wrong with office.
 
roadbloc said:
Uninstall it, sell it and buy iWork.

Seriously, it's a mystery to me on how people get Microsoft products running well on Macs. I had Office 2008. And it ran like utter poo. Filled my home folder full of rubbish, buggy, slow and pretty much dire. They had it at college, and it was just as bad.

I got iWork and everything was fine. But just out of curiosity, I downloaded an illegal copy of 2011 when it was released, just to see if it was worth investing in. What a waste of my download limit that was. It's just as bad and 10x more complicated with the whole 'ribbon' thing. The only advantage was that the new MSN had webcam support. Not that mattered to me as I switched to skype and AIM ages ago.

Seriously... I don't see how anyone can abide to the junk Microsoft release for Mac.
Click to expand...

You don't need to buy Office to get the latest version of MSN. MSN has always been a free download from Microsoft's Web site.
 
As unpopular as it may seem, I have MSO 2011 on my MBP and it runs great - really fast (much faster than 2004 or 2008), and the ribbon finally makes it consistent with PC Office - I would assert that this is the best Office for the Mac since about 1995, when we had Word 5.1, Excel 4 and PowerPoint 3. I really like it - it's a massive step up from the last two versions. I have to use it for work, and the kids need it for their school work, so we don't have much choice - at least now I don't feel like the Mac is a poor relation, like it has been for about the last 15 years.
 
Marky_Mark said:
As unpopular as it may seem, I have MSO 2011 on my MBP and it runs great - really fast (much faster than 2004 or 2008), and the ribbon finally makes it consistent with PC Office - I would assert that this is the best Office for the Mac since about 1995, when we had Word 5.1, Excel 4 and PowerPoint 3. I really like it - it's a massive step up from the last two versions. I have to use it for work, and the kids need it for their school work, so we don't have much choice - at least now I don't feel like the Mac is a poor relation, like it has been for about the last 15 years.
Click to expand...

+1 Works great for me. Of course I don't have anything less than a 4GB 2.4 C2D 2010 13"MBP. The iMac 3.06 is much faster.

Outlook can be a little slow on the MBP but that is really dependent on the connection to the Exchange server and how large my information store is. Now that I have it below 2GB (from 27GB) it's much faster. :)

Cheers,
 
ThomasJL said:
You don't need to buy Office to get the latest version of MSN. MSN has always been a free download from Microsoft's Web site.
Click to expand...
I know that and I never implied that. It does, however, come bundled with Office 2011, which is how I came about trying it.
 
I have iWork but its tools are too basic and limited yet

I have iWork and use it whenever relative simple jobs are but iWork applications need more basic tools and better compatibility with MSO2011 files in and out.
 
Office 2011 runs great on my 27" iMac i5 - no performance issues at all.

What I don't like is that Microsoft stripped Outlook out of the Home and Student edition. Outlook is one of the best eMail clients for Mac OS X, if not THE best -- Apple Mail, Thunderbird and everything else that I've seen pales in comparison. I'd love to have a Mac version of Ritlabs The Bat!, but since it was written in Delphi, I doubt that there will ever be an OS X version.

Comparing iWork and Office 2011... Forget about it. iWork is good enough for simple home use, but it's far from being an alternative when you want to use it for business purposes or anything big.

To the guy who wants to move to Latex: That has always been the number one choice for big scientific publications. However, you might also want to take a look at Scrivener -- it's the best tool for working on large writing projects and it was developed by people who actually write (and not just develop software). A Windows version of Scrivener will also be released soon, and they even have a Linux port available for early alpha testers.
(When Apple demonstrated Lion, you could even see the Scrivener icon a couple of times in Apple's presentation.)

Anyway. For everybody who does not have the money to burn on iWork or Office 2011, there still is OpenOffice.
 
I just installed MS Office 2011 on my MacPro (see specs below) and Excel is too slow to use. Even if I simply type into a cell, hit "tab" to get to the next cell, I'm faced with the spinning beach ball for a LOOOOONG time.

Something is clearly wrong here. I'm noticing it even slowed down my older 2004 version of Excel. Do you suppose it's because I have more than one version loaded on my machine?

CPU:
Mac Dual Core Intel Xenon - 2x 2.66 GHz
4 GB RAM
OSX version 10.6.5 (all updates installed)
 
Update

If you're having this issue, try Repairing your Disk Permissions via the Disk Utility. It solved the problem for me.
 
I also would recommend checking that sync services are turned off (if you don't need them for Outlook, etc). Word 2011 boots up for me in less than 2 seconds now.
 
MS Office 2011 is slow under Mac OS 10.7

When using MS Word 2011 with Lion on my 2x2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon w 12 GB DIMM, Word often cannot keep up with my typing. Should I expect slowness like that?
 
kmwiig said:
When using MS Word 2011 with Lion on my 2x2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon w 12 GB DIMM, Word often cannot keep up with my typing. Should I expect slowness like that?
Click to expand...

I'm not running Lion, but no you should not. I run Word 2011 on a 2005 MBP 1.83Ghz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and I do not see behavior like that.
 
MS Office doesnt run .... it creeps!

I have Leopart 10.6.8 suplemental update and MS Office 11 update to today and WORD is a DOG on my MacBook Pro 17" Intel Dual Core with 4Gb RAM same goes for MS EXCEL which takes 4 to 8 seconds to open a document (display its contents)

Shame that Numbers and Pages have so little tools otherwise would change it a hearth beat :mad:
 
Caribbean Mac said:
I have just installed MS Office 2011 in my MacBook and this is the slowest software I have seen since my MAC SE running DBase!

It is so slow that it has a 1 to 2 seconds screen reaction to main commands (open, save as, etc) :mad:

Why can MS do anything for MAC right?
Click to expand...
I’m using Outlook Mac 2011 Beta right now and it’s pretty nice. Still has some annoying quirks to it, however it’s still in beta so I can’t complain. Office 2011 for the Mac is NOT as good as the Windows version of Office.
 
increase speed...

Caribbean Mac said:
I have just installed MS Office 2011 in my MacBook and this is the slowest software I have seen since my MAC SE running DBase!

It is so slow that it has a 1 to 2 seconds screen reaction to main commands (open, save as, etc) :mad:

Why can MS do anything for MAC right?
Click to expand...

Well, it can be significantly improved by just deactivating for example the WYSIWYG font style menu. You can find this in the Settings under General Settings. If you have a lot of fonts installed, the startup and rendering probably takes a while. On my system this changed the starting of Word to some acceptable time. There might be more such settings that improve the startup behavior. Does anybody know of something else?

In general, I think that this version of MS Office is much better than any earlier. The startup speed is a serious issue, where MS should come up with some improvement. I am surprised that the updates so far did not address this issue in any way.
 
Did you delete duplicate fonts installed by Office 2011?

See Font Management for help:
http://www.officeformachelp.com/office/font-management/

Remove these files:

1) Quit all Microsoft applications.
2) Track down all instances of pre-2011 Normal template on your computer, and drag them to your desktop.
Office X: The Normal file is located in the "Templates" folder in your "Microsoft Office" folder.
Office Word 2004 moves the Normal Template to live in the Microsoft User Data folder by default.
3) Find and drag the file Normal.dotm to your desktop. Unless you have moved it, it should be in

~ /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

4) Drag the entire Microsoft folder to Desktop from User/Library/Preferences/

5) Now re-start Word 2011 and it should be OK.

Lastly, testing in a new User will quickly tell you if the problem is system wide or if it's your User's folder that contains the problem.

CREATE A NEW USER

Go to System Preferences --> Create a New User in Accounts. Switch to the New User by logging out/in or use Fast User Switching.

Open Word. The first time will be slow as it builds cache files. Then see if there is an improvement on launch time.
 
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