Interesting Dilema

[Habitus]

All,

I ran into a rather annoying situation last night with my 13" MBP. It's a 2.26GHz with 2GB of RAM.

I was working with an external Monitor (lid closed) with multiple excel files. First off, does excel (MS 2004) require a large amount of RAM? I ask because I ran into the beach ball numerous times during simple tasks.

Lastly, when my Mac seemed to slow down dramatically, switching between excel files caused my monitor to display a blue (the same screen when you shut down) for a brief amount of time and then return to my desktop. I then had to re open all my files.

This happened twice, but not when the external monitor was disconnected.

-Habitus

 

[MacsOnAnabolics]

Try double-checking your connection to your external display. The light-blue screen that you see is the display detection. Is this the first time you are using an adapter to reach your monitor? BTW the MSO files might be corrupted from another source.

 

[kolax]

Office 2004 has been said to be quicker than Office 2008, so it'd be worth checking out what is happening in Activity Monitor when this happens - see how much RAM and CPU usage Office is using. It is possible there is something else running in the background that is causing problems. Is it just Office that you've experienced that..?

 

[prodigee]

I would say check and see if there are any other applications running that you may not realize. Check activity monitor, and see if there are any updates for Office 2004.

 

[LAS.mac]

Is Office 2004 completely compatible with SL? And, is the OP running 10.6 or 10.5?
This can be a difference.
I found excel 2004 very slow in 10.5. I didn't take the chance and installed excel 2008 under 10.6. No complains so far.

 

[ncdasa]

i dont know, but in my (very very limited) experince with Microsft Word, Office, etc. I found them very disturbing and problematic (and iam referring more to the apps themselves than the way they ran on my black macbook).

And I understand that if someone is already very familiar with them and would be bothered by learning another app. that they may not want to change, but if you like maybe you could try some of the based equivalents. I believe apps. like OpenOffice, Pages, etc may also do what you are looking for and run smoother.

 

[dudeitsjay]

op you wanna switch over to office 2008. Actually just bought a 2.26 today and installed 2008 on it and i think excel only takes up 37mb of ram (istats) when i opened it (so not including any additional things like macros) to see that it was all installed well... Maybe i read it wrong... either way, excel shouldn't be giving you beachies

And when people have been complaining about 2008 being slower than 2004, I really couldn't justify that observation besides the fact that 2008 tends to load slower. Otherwise, the 08's sleeker UI and more options makes the extra 3-5sec loading wait time worth it...

 

[Habitus]

Thanks for the reply all.

Weird situation only because the blank screen occurs when I'm using the external monitor. Hasn't happened when I'm using my Mac's display.

Does everyone agree that a upgrade to MS Office 2008 is a must? Is the student price still $149?

Thanks all!