Need help speeding up powerpoint on mini and PB

[labrador]

I use both a 12 inch pb (1.5 ghz with 1.25 RAM) and a mac mini (1.42 with 1 g RAM) and use one at home, one at work. I'm very happy with both systems, except I'd like more speed when I work with MS powerpoint. I do lots of talks in my work and spend a great deal of time sorting and reorganizing powerpoint slides from various presentations. Even when I have only pp open (but with several presentations), slide refresh, etc. seems delayed. Is this cpu related? Any ideas how to improve the performance on either of my systems? Thanks so much.

 

[ITASOR]

Sorry, but I run Office 2004 on my 933Mhz G4 Quicksilver w/ 768MB RAM and my grandpa's Dual 2.3Ghz G5 w/ 1.5GB RAM and it's really sluggish on both. It doesn't even really seem faster on one than the other. I think office is just like that. If you making the slideshows for yourself personally, I would try out iWork.

 

[dukeblue91]

I don't use PP much but I would give keynote a try

 

[javiercr]

I don't use PP much but I would give keynote a try

you can export the presentation from keynote to PP after, works quite well

 

[kraftzwerg]

Same problem over here ...

I use both a 12 inch pb (1.5 ghz with 1.25 RAM) and a mac mini (1.42 with 1 g RAM) and use one at home, one at work. I'm very happy with both systems, except I'd like more speed when I work with MS powerpoint. I do lots of talks in my work and spend a great deal of time sorting and reorganizing powerpoint slides from various presentations. Even when I have only pp open (but with several presentations), slide refresh, etc. seems delayed. Is this cpu related? Any ideas how to improve the performance on either of my systems? Thanks so much.

I have exactly the same configuration (12" PB + Mac Mini 1.42 w/ 1 Gig) as you do and experience exactly the same problem with Powerpoint. Both systems are plenty fast for all other tasks, but the PP performance is simply not enough to work efficiently. The problem is that Keynote is not really an alternative, because PP is a de facto standard - all the time I get PP files from colleagues or have to pass on my PP files to them, so I'm bound to use the same standard. I suspect Microsoft to have deliberately made the Mac Version slow. Otherwise it's great software, it can do everything I want, but speed is a real issue here.