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Office:Mac 2008 = slow

gotohamish said:
As someone who's never used iWork, and as someone who uses the most basic Excel and Word features, is it really a viable alternative to switch?

Can PC users open iWork doc files in Word? What are the drawbacks?

Thanks
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If you're a basic word and excel user, iWork would work great. It opens most Office files just fine although ones with heavy formatting might have some small issues. You can also export to Office 2003 formats. I use to be a Office user but switched to iWork.

There are some things you'll find iWork lacks such as being able to create double borders in Numbers. The most basic feature yet some how overlooked. I'm sure it will be in iWork 2010 as one of their new "300" features. ;)
 
Not what I see here

I have a first gen Macbook (Oct 2006, 2 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 10.5.1) and all the Office 2008 applications open in less than 5 seconds for the first launch, in about 2-3 seconds for subsequent launches. If any of these applications is taking longer than 10 seconds, especially on subsequent launches, on any Macbook or Macbook Pro, something is seriously wrong.

You might be running out of memory. Are these numbers with nothing else running? What does Activity Monitor say about memory usage?
 
Add me to the list of unhappy people. But then again, updates will arrive eventually that you'd hope speed it all up. Not too bothered about startup times. Takes about 5-15 seconds here (MB C2D 2GB). What annoys me about it is that there is virtually _nothing_ new in 08 of any real use, and a large amount of it all seems to be identical to 04 in terms of the UI.

And not that it is a huge problem, but there doesn't seem to be any refined, B&W 'style' included by default. If I want a bunch of styles that will just give me black text, maybe possibly bold / italics here and there in the headings, and sensible paragraph layouts, I have to create it myself from scratch?

The bibliography thing is a welcome addition, but fairly crippled when it comes to comparing it with the alternatives that already exist. The equation editor in 08 is identical to that in 04, where as PC users on 07 got a significant update to theirs?

I don't see powerpoint tempting back from keynote.app.

I can forsee some ugly, horridly designed 07/08-based .docs turning up in my inbox over the next few years...
 
deathdruid said:
I have a first gen Macbook (Oct 2006, 2 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 10.5.1) and all the Office 2008 applications open in less than 5 seconds for the first launch, in about 2-3 seconds for subsequent launches. If any of these applications is taking longer than 10 seconds, especially on subsequent launches, on any Macbook or Macbook Pro, something is seriously wrong.

You might be running out of memory. Are these numbers with nothing else running? What does Activity Monitor say about memory usage?
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What version of office do you have? Full, media, student?

No, 4gb, fresh reboot = plenty of memory.
 
catachip said:
On my MacBook Pro (2.4 Ghz with 4 GB of Ram and 256 MB video card) Word 2008 takes 24.9 seconds to open the first time (after reboot), versus 8.1 seconds for Word 2004. Opening Word 2008 a second time takes 4.3 seconds, versus 5.8 for World 2004. However, once in the program it is noticeably faster. I can't imagine that yours would be any faster.
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Why can't you? 24.9 seconds is ridiculously long.

I would post a video for you if you really really want.

It takes at most 3 seconds after logging in (depending what stage it is in as I have quite a few items that open on boot).

Under heavy load, i.e. running football manager my system has at most taken 19 seconds to launch Word.
 
Consultant said:
What version of office do you have? Full, media, student?
Click to expand...

I have the Home and Student version. I am not denying anyone's claims of slowness, BTW; I am just saying Office 2008 is not slower as a rule. Certainly tons faster than Office 2004 -- I used to convert all Office docs to PDF just coz Office 2004 took too long to open.

Care to post an Activity Monitor/top screenshot?
 
Microsoft can't seem to build nice efficient apps unless they're bloated. Well with iWork and the fact that Office '08 is slow, Apple should see some market share in that field.
 
According to activity monitor, Word:Mac 2008 uses 138.55mb of "real" memory, with a blank page open. Excel 2008 = 75.3mb, which is in the ball park of even the 50 megs each that these programs take up on my XP machine, using Office 2003. Yes, load times are slow. About 11-12 seconds, but I think I'd be less disappointed if they included some form of data analysis tool plugin. Anything to keep me off my XP partition. Basic stuff, guys.
 
It's taking over 1 minute to open each program on my mac pro. I dunno what's going on....I'll try uninstall/reinstall I guess.
 
Im running office 04 on my imac which is running tiger. In word it does 4 bounces then about 2 secs wait and then your in. The speed office starts up probably depends on how good your computer is. I have 1GB of ram. But as I said I guess it depends on how good your computer is.

Getting new white macbook
 
Office is not yet performance optimized

This whole thing stinks. I know Intel is the future, but for those of us still with PowerPC, to hear that the performance is decreased is a real downer.

i was looking forward to this release, but the lack of Time machine compatibility (with Entourage) and now reports of poor performance are putting me off. I'm glad I only paid $30 for it using the rebates.

This is an office suite, not a CPU/RAM intensive suite. The whole thing just smacks of not being performance optimised. if I believed in conspiracies, I would propose that MS is doing this on purpose. Keeping the office experience sucky on OS X is a heck of a way to try and keep people on the Windows platform.
 
After reading this thread, there's no way I'm getting Office '08. '04 works just fine on my Macbook.
 
Of course Office whatever starts more quickly on XP. Office and Windows XP are more tightly integrated and XP prefetches most of the office engine on startup (why XP boots more slowly among other things).

In response times it is the same as if you had already started Office 2004/8 on OSX and closed a window.
 
The speed of apps, esp. those of Windows has many variables that affect it.

- Amount of RAM
- Amount of free hard drive space
- App design (code, how clean and efficient is it)

My Office 2k8, running on a CoreDuo 2ghz w/ 2gbs of ram opens between 7-8 seconds. But if a file is being loaded, depending upon size, any amount speed less than 30 seconds could very well happen.
 
So I've done some tests as well..

Specs: MacBookPro 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, OS X 10.5.1

Nearly 3000 installed fonts (yes I know, its an illness..)

Drag and drop to open a word 2004 doc ("test" was the only text in the doc). I only considered it open when program would acknowledge a keystroke.

Word 2004 - 1:18.2
Word 2008 - 4:29.2
Pages 08 - 0:05.7

Yes, 4.5 MINUTES to open the word "test" in Word 2008!

Its already un-installed, and its safe to say I won't be purchasing ANY version of Microsoft Word 2008.
 
Been Using Office 2008 Since Wednesday & overall I'm happy with it.

I read through this thread & decided to test the opening speeds the applications for myself.

I rebooted & opened each application, except Entourage, with a data heavy document, my results....

Word 8 Seconds
Excel 7 Seconds
PowerPoint 8 Seconds
Entourage 7 Seconds

All of which seem acceptable to me. I didn't test Office 2004 before I removed it.

I have them running on a Macmini 1.66Ghz Core Duo ~ 2Gig Ram ~ Leopard

Apart from the odd bug or two in Entourage I think it's a cool package & would recommend it. I won't be going back to Office 2004.

I sometimes wonder if I the only person who actually thinks Entourage is fab. Loved in 2004 & think it looks so much better in 2008. IMHO anyway.

Thanks for reading & Have fun & I hope you find a solution that suites you

Cheers

 
Office 2008 runs fine.

I just tried opening Office 2007 on XP, and it took 'a while'.
Office 2008 on 10.5.1 takes 'a while' to open, too.

Now, lets be honest. It's a 1.0 version, MBU's first real attempt at a UB, and it's pretty darn good.

Now I don't know where danpat gets over 4 minutes to open a file up :eek: but I find it a worthy successor to Office 2004, and a fine companion to Office 2007 (for what I need, as a student). Personally, I never liked Pages (although Keynote is a work of G-d), and if you want a good word processor, Office 2008 is a good choice.

Other alternatives:
Bean - Free
Open Office 2.0 - Free
iWork - $69
 
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It was taking about 1:10 for each office program to open.

I got it down to about 0:17 by disabling 3000 of my fonts.
 
Fonts

That is interesting. I only have Office 08 and iWork installed for a total of 210 fonts -- no CS3 and the like, which probably come with more fonts. Is having a large number of fonts the reason for slow launch times?
 
tibi08 said:
Just took me 50 seconds on my 2.2Ghz MBP. Urgh. Will try repairing disk permissions and rebooting (again).
Click to expand...

Just reduced this to 33 seconds by disabling half of the 213 fonts on my Mac. It's defo related to the system fonts, it says "optimising font menu performance" for ages when loading....

There is a setting in the Word settings (General section) called "WYSIWYG font styles and menus" which you can disable. Disabling this means you don't see the font styles in the font selection menu, but reduces my loading time after reboot from 50s to 37s, with all my fonts enabled.
 
tibi08 said:
There is a setting in the Word settings (General section) called "WYSIWYG font styles and menus" which you can disable. Disabling this means you don't see the font styles in the font selection menu, but reduces my boot time from 50s to 37s, with all my fonts enabled.
Click to expand...

FWIW, I had that disabled during my tests. 37 seconds is still abnormal, so there must be something else going on.
 
deathdruid said:
FWIW, I had that disabled during my tests. 37 seconds is still abnormal, so there must be something else going on.
Click to expand...

I'm struggling to believe that you get a 5 second Word launch after reboot. My machine has barely brought up the splash screen for Word at that point. And my hardware is significantly superior!

If this is really true then I wish I knew what other settings you'd changed to achieve it...

PS: Just achieved 24 second boot this time. Getting more acceptable now.
 
When I got my first Mac having come over from Linux back in 2003 I was hoping to avoid all things Microsoft. Unfortunately, I then took on some consulting work and needed Office so I bought the then current version, Office v.X, and got on with my job. I did notice some odd compatibility problems but by and large it was quick enough and worked. At another job, I was given a copy of 2004 and found it horribly slow compared to v.X so I uninstalled and went back to my previous version. Even when I got my first Intel Mac I stuck with v.X because it was much quicker than 2004. The only thing that really bugs me about v.X is the stupid 32 character limit on names so I always have to go and change the name to something meaningful after saving. Other than that, it is better in every way than 2004 and starts much quicker on Intel Macs and quicker than 2008 by the sounds of it too.

I have bought every version of iWork waiting for 2008 and found for my purposes (presentations, nice looking charts and documents) iWork 08 is excellent and v.X does what I need when only Office is acceptable although mainly I check that PPT or DOC exports look roughly OK coming out of Keynote and Pages. Anyway, it looks like 2008 is just too late in the day and really not much of an improvement on previous versions.

Of course, MS has chosen to remove the updates to v.X from mactopia so it is a good job I kept them as I downloaded each.
 
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