Large Files Slow in iWork '09

[4mStalker]

I normally find the answer I'm looking for while stalking forums, I've never actually had to post...

I'm working with a numbers document that's just over 3000 rows and 11 columns. Searching, and certain functions are quite slow - not impossible, but frustrating. It's been years since I worked with Excel on a PC, but it was never this sluggish...

Using this file, I did a mail merge with a Pages document. The merge took over an hour (this too seems slow, but since I only do it once, whatever). The resulting file is 1.1MB and just over 3000 pages. It was nearly impossible to scroll/review anything in the document. After closing it, Pages crashes upon trying to reopen the document. I got it opened on another MBP, but it's impossibly slow over there too.

It's looking like iWork is not able to handle large projects. I'm posting here in hopes that there's some magical fix that will make it work like Office (did I just say that?)

The system is 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo MBP, 3GB RAM, Snow Leopard, all updated and permissions repaired this morning.

The other comp is same (maybe less RAM).

Thanks in advance.

 

[kelvSYC]

IIRC, the delays are due to the fact that iWork stores all its files in an XML format, and the format is in such a way that particularly large files degrade the overall performance due to the overall size of the XML file (this has been an issue since the original iWork). (As an example of performance degradation in XML, searching XML databases with XQuery, say, on a decent-sized database take time in the order of minutes, regardless of what XQuery processor you use, largely due to the fact that in terms of data storage, XML isn't that efficient.)

In essence, iWork is supposed to be a "light" suite, generally incapable of the large word processing and spreadsheeting that Word and Excel provide. (From experience, any more than 50 rows in one table on one sheet in Numbers will start to degrade the performance, as Numbers is essentially a page-layout program that does light spreadsheeting on the side).

 

[4mStalker]

Thanks

Thanks, that's what I needed.