Loading time on Office '03

[hikingnclimbing]

I bought a PB back in January with 768MB. I installed Office '03. It seems like it takes forever for it to open a simple spreadsheet or even start up Word. I don't get the spinning wheel, just the timer turning over and over. Is this a memory issue or something other than that? I'd rather not have to buy new memory for it as I don't really have the money right now. I have defraged my drive and done a disk verify and hardware check. What else could I try to make it load faster? It's getting rather annoying when my old PC loads Office XP faster than my Mac loads '03.

 

[risc]

I take it you are talking about Office XP (Windows) versus Office v.X 2004 (OS X) you will find that Office on Windows does a lot of preloading that is why it seems to start up faster. I've only used Office v.X 2004 on a Power Mac dual G5 and I've had no problems with the speed of it, that machine does have 2GB of RAM though you could fire up Activity Monitor and see what the machine actually does when you fire up Office you may find you don't have enough RAM and you are waiting for the application to swap out.

 

[yellow]

Office '03?

There was no office '03 for the Mac. There was only Office X and Office 2004 for OS X. Do you mean one of those?

And I'm not sure what you mean about a timer turning over and over. There's no hourglass icon in Office on OS X. It's a spinning color wheel or a small watch.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

Ok, so it must be Office 2004. (Sorry about that. I'm stuck at work and my PB is at home.) I'll double check the timer and take a screen shot of it tonight. As for the activity monitor, thanks for the tip. I stupidly hadn't thought of that. I'll give that a go as well tonight.

 

[yellow]

Also, which PB (specs), and which version of OS X are you running?

 

[projectle]

Assuming that he bought it first hand in January, then it would definitely have OS X 10.4 (most likely 10.4.7 now due to updates).

If he did not buy it first hand, then if it was manufactured in the past 18 months, then it is also 10.4

 

[yellow]

There's no point in making assumptions based on almost no info..

PowerBooks have been sold as such since 1991. While it's rather unlikely that it's an original PowerBook, it could be (and is, according to the OP's signature) any of the G4 series of PowerBooks, sold since 2001, and they originally came with OS 9. So there's simply no way of telling with the information given to us which version of PowerBook it is, and which version of the OS it came with.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

Ok, now that I'm finally home, here is all of the info that I should have had before I originally posted.

Mac OS X 10.4.7
1.5 GHz PowerPC G4
768 MB DDR SDRAM

As for the software, it's Office 2004 for Mac. Excel is version 11.2.5.

As for the system monitor, I tried opening a simple calculations spreadsheet that I have (it just calculates my MPG and then has a graph of it). This is how the activity monitor looked. I marked the area that encompassed while Excel was opening my document.

Thanks again for all your help!

 

[yellow]

I think we were probably looking more for CPU usage than graphs, as the graph (without X/Y labeled vectors) doesn't tell us much other than something was "niced" at those moments.

So, do you get a timer turning over and over when you start Word/Excel still? Can you get us a screen shot of the icon?
Can you clock for us in seconds (or bounces) how long it takes to open each app?

 

[BornAgainMac]

I think we were probably looking more for CPU usage than graphs, as the graph (without X/Y labeled vectors) doesn't tell us much other than something was "niced" at those moments.

Or use your facial expressions using iSight as your waiting for Excel to startup. No X/Y labeled vectors required.

 

[yellow]

I suppose that could indeed be used as a metric for startup times.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

When opening an Excel spreadsheet with very little data in it, it took 48.45 seconds according to my stop watch. When starting just Excel, it took 3.0 seconds to reach the project gallery screen. The times for opening a spreadsheet are pretty universal. No matter how big or small the spreadsheet is, it still takes forever to open.

As for the timer, it is a watch the comes onto the screen. Sometimes it is immediately proceeded by the spinning wheel. Sometimes it is not. I tried taking a screenshot of it, but grab won't capture what the cursor looks like, only what I tell it to look like in my preferences.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

Or use your facial expressions using iSight as your waiting for Excel to startup. No X/Y labeled vectors required.

But I'm not cool enough to have iSight.
I don't even have a cheap webcam.
But my facial expressions would be similar to....

 

[risc]

So what is the application that is running "niced" in the background? It's stealing all your CPU and if it is accessing the HDD this could be the reason you are waiting so long. Stop that app and try again.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

I was folding in the background. However, once I closed everything except for Finder and Dashboard, it still took 45.84 seconds to load the same document.

 

[yellow]

Odd.
I've created a tiny test xls document, if you care to download it and try and open (and time) it. There's nothing more in it than 1+2=3 and 3+4=7.
(It has to be zipped to be attached here, .xls isn't a supported file extension for the PHP uploader)

If you have a test spreadsheet that you'd like to share, I can compare opening times with Excel 2004 here.

 

[hikingnclimbing]

Weird. That only took a little under 5 seconds.

The MPG spreadsheet attached takes me.... great... even less than that. (So I won't attach it and clutter the system.)

So it must be something buggy with one spreadsheet. I'd share it, but it has people's contact information on it. I'll try to get ride of some of the formatting and everything. Maybe that is causing my problem.

Oh, well. I guess I'm just too much of a geek if I'm tracking everything with spreadsheets. Once I removed all of the formatting, it was still taking forever. So I just copied the data onto a new sheet and it loads in under 5 seconds.

So I guess it's the spreadsheet.

Sorry for all the run around! Thanks for all your help everyone!

 

[yellow]

You already got to my next suggestion!

This is typically a good tactic for problem with any Word/Excel/PPT docs that one is having troubles with (for future readers of this thread). When in doubt, always try and copy/paste into a new doc. The amount of formatting and metadata that goes on behind the scenes in a simple doc (Word for example) is mind-boggling, and one little corruption can send the whole thing into a tizzy.

No problem, glad you sorted it!

 

[gkarris]

Any updates on this issue?

My friend is now starting to experience the same thing on his PB G4, 1.3 GHz, 768 Megs RAM, OS 10.4.7, Office 2004.

Anybody got any answers? He gets a constant spinning wheel when opening any of the MS Office Apps.

I have an old 600MHz G3 iBook with 640 Megs RAM, OS 10.4.7, and Office 2004 and I don't have any problems.

Thanks....

 

[BornAgainMac]

Try two things:

1) Repair Permissions
2) Create another user account and test the load speeds with that account

If it is the 2nd thing that worked then it must be something local to that user. I have seen things like that before. Perhaps just move all your data to the new temporary account. Drop the account and recreate it and move your stuff back. Probably a Genius Bar person could determine the exact problem with Office or a MS tech person.

 

[gkarris]

Try two things:

1) Repair Permissions
2) Create another user account and test the load speeds with that account

If it is the 2nd thing that worked then it must be something local to that user. I have seen things like that before. Perhaps just move all your data to the new temporary account. Drop the account and recreate it and move your stuff back. Probably a Genius Bar person could determine the exact problem with Office or a MS tech person.

How do you repair permissions?