Microsoft Office for Mac

[Jason Beck]

Microsoft Office is slow in OSX period.

Even with 4GB of ram and an SSD it's still extremely sluggish. It's sad when Photoshop CS5 opens faster than Word. I installed the 2010 Office Beta last week. It appears to have slightly improved speed, though it's not dramatic.

If you can, just stick with iWork. When I used my old MBP in college I always wrote my papers in Pages and just saved it as a word document before submitting them. My professors never had an issue opening them on their PCs.

However, if you need to spend a lot of time in Excel then I'm not sure what your options are to improve speed, aside from installing Windows in Bootcamp and just using Office on the Windows partition.

I am running the beta of Office 2011 and wow. It is insanely faster than previous versions. Even though I am on an ssd drive I noticed a complete 50% increase in overall responsiveness and cold start times.
It's good. Has some issues, but it's a beta. Other than the issues, its awesome. Love the new ribbon too. Just cold started Word, and was at a workable blank document in under 1 second.
11 Will be a force to be reckoned with. Thanks microsoft!

 

[StEvEnGtR]

In my case starting up and shutting down Office for Mac 2010 Beta 2 just
goes as quickly as it should, but loading a simple Word document takes a
while. In Windows everything is loaded instantly, the Mac version really sucks at this.

Another thing, I hate it that I'm not able to copy a Word table into PowerPoint.
For some reason it turns the dang thing into an image...

But we were talking about performance, so, loading documents is something that takes a while on my machine.

 

[weckart]

The reason that MS Office loads more quickly on Windows on first opening an application is that Microsoft preloads Office on booting Windows whether you intend to use it or not. This slows down the Windows boot process by about the same time it speeds up opening the Office applications for the first time.

Since the MacBU does not have the same privileged access to all the parts of OSX and is working from ported Windows source code, there is only so much it can do to speed things up.

And yes, the leaked beta of Office 2011 is promising, but 1 second from a cold start to a document? No chance.