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Microsoft Office 2008 Update Brings Speed Increases and New Features

Slow is really faster than Excel 2008 is

MattyP30 said:
it better speed up significantly!! i'm writing my thesis at the moment and the scrolling can be painful sometimes!
Click to expand...

Using my 3 GHz Intel Mac Pro with Excel 2008 is an exercise in futility. It takes several seconds per line when scrolling. I do mean line & not page. If I can find my copy of Excel 2008 I can reinstall it & see if Excel 2008 can be a working program.

Excel 2004 is very fast on this Intel Mac. Seems strange that an universal app is slower than a PPC apt.
 
Update: Spaces kinda works

I mentioned in an earlier post that my combo of Spaces and Hyperspaces
worked fine with Word (and Excel and PowerPoint). Well, of course, that is
no longer the case after installing this update - I should have known better,
and not installed.

However, after a little playing around, I discovered that I don't have any
Spaces issues if I close the Word Toolbox (if it was open for that document).
This is the 2nd small window marked "Formatting Palette" that opens in the
current Space, but doesn't switch to the target Space. Don't know what it
means, but hey, it's a workaround . . . ;^)

And as other posters have noted, indeed Word start-up times are nearly
instantaneous if you had been running it previously.

Whatever . . . ;^)
 
Too slow of a Mac for Office 2008

gugy said:
I am in a conundrum:
I would love to dump my Office suite for the Mac alternative. My problem is that my normal mail is mostly in Hotmail and Entourage works well with it. Also I do like the fact Calendar and Address Book is all inside one app.

Oh boy, maybe when Snow Leopard comes out I will be able to ditch Office and just come 100% into the Mac world.

We'll see.

by the way, Entourage takes more than 4 minutes to launch and my computer is not slow (MacPro 2.8 Octo, 10gig RAM):mad:
Click to expand...


My operating speeds for Office 2008 are like yours. I have a 1st gen Intel Mac Pro running at 3 GHz. I guess our Macs are just too slow to run MS software. We'll have to wait until the 4+ GHz models come out. Or maybe if MS could do better with more cores we could wait for a 16 core machine. Probably both of the changes are needed.

Until that happens I'll continue to use Excel 2004 at great speeds. Forget MS Office 2008.
 
Wow!

heisetax said:
Using my 3 GHz Intel Mac Pro with Excel 2008 is an exercise in futility. It takes several seconds per line when scrolling. I do mean line & not page. If I can find my copy of Excel 2008 I can reinstall it & see if Excel 2008 can be a working program.

Excel 2004 is very fast on this Intel Mac. Seems strange that an universal app is slower than a PPC apt.
Click to expand...

How big is the spreadsheet that doesn't scroll? I just did a quick test on a
small (200 rows, 10 columns) spreadsheet, and no delay in the scrolling.

In general, 2004 was faster, seemingly regardless of system. I recently sold
an 800MHz G4 iMac with 768MB RAM with 2004 on it, and it was much
faster than 2008 on newer Intel laptops with 2+ GHz CPUs and 4GB RAM
sitting right next to it.

No comprende, senor . . . ;^)
 
yojitani said:
No, it didn't fix the problem.
Click to expand...

Did it at least offer a significant improvement?

For me at least I am yet to get it to "jump" spaces, and the toolbox has yet to blank out like it used to. Granted, it is summer, and I am not doing as much word processing as I do during the school year, but when I do I have no problems, and the couple of "tests" I have run (completely spaz-ing out and quickly and violently switching spaces and applications) have all yet to cause a malfunction. Maybe it is my hardware, my install, something, but Office has actually gone back to being a usable piece of software. Still sh*t compared to it's Windows equivalent, but still the best piece of software for taking notes in class...
 
heisetax said:
My operating speeds for Office 2008 are like yours. I have a 1st gen Intel Mac Pro running at 3 GHz. I guess our Macs are just too slow to run MS software. We'll have to wait until the 4+ GHz models come out. Or maybe if MS could do better with more cores we could wait for a 16 core machine. Probably both of the changes are needed.

Until that happens I'll continue to use Excel 2004 at great speeds. Forget MS Office 2008.
Click to expand...

I went through this when I first got my Intel Mac a few months ago. You
won't like the solution, but you need to run 2004 or 2008 - can't have both
on the same machine at the same time.

I just popped up Entourage in about 4 seconds - and I only have 1/4 the
computer you do . . . ;^)
 
On my Powerbook 1GHz, only Excel loads much faster. Word and Entourage have barely improved in speed. There's no startup improvement in Entourage at all. I can't say anything about Powerpoint because I wiped that crap of the harddisk... Keynote is way better (and faster).

And for some reason Entourage always uses a lot of cpu-power. It heats up my Powerbook very fast. Same goes for MS Messenger. Even when both are doing "nothing". Why is that?
 
I can see the speed improvement with Excel and Powerpoint, but with Entourage, unfortunately it's still a snail app, and Word, I don't know if this is normal, but my word still states its version is 12.0.1?!?!

word still crashes like hell :(

I'm on a Powermac G5 2x2.0, using OS X 10.4.11
 
Should I install service pack 1 in order to install sp2?

I remember when I installed sp1 in the past it gave me problems.
 
ThomasJL said:
Then why is the AutoUpdate's Service Pack 2 file much smaller than the one that can be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site?
Click to expand...

Think of the larger one as a combo update file, while the smaller one is just the files needed to do the update (forgot the word for that, hope it makes sense).
 
Yeah...it also "checks" to see if you have a valid serial number.

So if you don't, this update breaks it.

Just an FYI.
 
Sweet

I'm a SharePoint Administrator and I rely on full office fidelity. iWork is cool for personal documents but if someone sends me a .docx policy for review, I need to be able to send something back with the formatting and file format unaltered. We also leverage word's flexibility quite a bit. The shape and graphics tools are incredibly powerful. Office 2008 on mac was a must for me and that's why I bought it.

  • Thank You for SharePoint Intergration
  • Thank You for the speed increase (It was way too slow, almost usable for regular use)

In the next version of Office mac please make your gui consistent with the Windows version. I realize your gearing towards 2004 users and photoshop users, but in Office the floating toolbar is so much less efficient than the ribbon. It takes me 10 minutes to create a document that would take me 2 in Office 2007. One last feature request..... export to silverlight feature for PowerPoint would be slick.

One Noters, there is a word template called "Word Notebook Layout". It's essentially the same interface.
 
MSN MESSENGER Problems

Since applying the update my MSN Messenger now auto-signs out after 10-15 minutes. Anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

I'm on a corporate network but its been ok for the last 3 years and suddenly now I have this problem with the update.

I've tried dumping the Library/Prefs file with no joy.
 
Noticeable speed increase, I'd say. I'm not a frequent office user, partially because it takes ages to load. But this is good news either way.
 
aced411 said:
In the next version of Office mac please make your gui consistent with the Windows version.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I know the Mac BU tries to be "Mac-like," but generally fails. I'm not a huge fan of The Ribbon, but interface consistency between Windows and Mac versions of Office would be nice (since the Mac version interfaces aren't stellar either).

More importantly, how about feature parity? To me the most frustrating thing is the ability to do something in, say PowerPoint 2007 but not be able to do the same thing in PowerPoint 2008. It's aggravating to try to figure out where the "missing features" are.

I swear Microsoft deliberately leaves features out of the Mac versions of their apps, even though the Mac versions come later. The Mac BU will deny this I'm sure, but there seems to be overwhelming evidence to counter their denials.
 
Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9500/4.7.0.122 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/167)

My apps don't seem to be launching faster but otherwise everything else is working fine.
 
Downloading it as we speak.

Frankly, if it were not for Office on the Mac I would never have switched hardware. I just have far too many uses for various Office applications and the fact it just works; granted a bit slower on my Mac; is all that mattered. I am not one to casually toss aside years of investment in learning and using a system for flippant reasons.

I used iWork or whatever it was called during a trial period and never made it past the first week.
 
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