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Office:Mac 2008 = slow

tibi08 said:
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!
Click to expand...

I figured that maybe my subjective stopclock was not working too well, so I used the following simple Applescript:

Code: 
set starttime to ((current date)'s time)
tell application "Microsoft Word"
	activate
	set endtime to ((current date)'s time)
	set timetaken to endtime - starttime
	display dialog ("Word started in " & timetaken & " seconds")
end tell

Results are 8 - 15 seconds right after boot (still varies a lot), 3 - 4 seconds for subsequent launches. I have 210 fonts, and am not using WYSIWYG font/style menus. For comparison, Pages is about 5 - 10 seconds for the initial launch, 1 - 2 seconds for subsequent launches. I no longer have Office 2004 installed.

Considering I think I have pretty much the lowest end Intel Mac, anything above 25 seconds with sufficient RAM and without WYSIWYG font menus means there is something wrong. Also, since I almost never reboot, 3-4 seconds for relaunch is not bad.
 
Hi there.

I got an imac core duo 2ghz with leopard 10.5.1

I installed office 2008 and all apps take ages to load! I get a spinning wheel every time.

I don't know whats causing this? anyone found what might be the problem?

I tried opening word from a guest account i created and it loads slow the first time (but not that slow like before) and then quitting and opening it again. Second time it loads really fast as it should be.

What seems to be the problem?

Could it be the fonts?

Start Up items?

Anyone found a fix?
 
Looking at this. . .

- It seems that the MS apps are CPU bound at startup, that is, they take up at least 50-80 of the CPU during the initial startup. So if you have other applications running in the background using up CPU (looking at you, Dashboard), then that could impact startup.

- More importantly, at startup, it seems that each MS app requires at least 50-100 Megabytes of Real Memory. In my case, I already ran out of RAM, so Leopard was actually swapping to disk and using quite a bit of it. So when I rebooted my Mac Mini (2 Gigs of RAM, BTW) and started up the MS apps, they came up much faster (although not a fast as I expected). Subsequently launches came up faster (I think they get cached by the OS at that point, but I could be wrong).

In both cases, you can verify using Activity Monitor; from there, you can slo check out which applications is using up the most memory / CPU and shut time down accordingly to see if that helps with the MS startup. As a quick fix, shutdown Safari, as that takes up lots of memory (300 Meg Plus on mine at the moment. :eek:)

As for MS Office 2008, I think it is worth it if you need to interact with the rest of the world. There is no big changes with Entourage (which is very disappointing), but otherwise, the rest of the suite seems to be a winner.

You know what's amazing, though? I just started up Neooffice and even if you were open up multiple windows, it running neck-to-neck with Word for CPU utilization - and actually consumes less memory that Word. :p
 
Guess I should count myself lucky because I'm not experiencing the super slow times many of you are seeing. Word takes about 10-12 secs after reboot. Every app takes longer on initial load after reboot. That's standard fared if you will. Subsequent starts of Word only take about 4-5 secs. See sig for specs...

Not sure what's happening for some, but the outrageously slow times certainly are not "universal".
 
My insertion point is kind of sluggish. It doesn't stay solid when I type or skip lines, which is annoying. Other than that, Office 2008 is pretty fast, in my experience.
 
I believe you'll all find it's just a way of tricking our minds into thinking Safari is even snappier than first believed...:eek:
 
I am looking at about 12-15 seconds on my Macbook which isn't too bad, but around the same on my 1.33Ghz iBook G4 with less RAM. Weird :confused:
 
I have a MBP 2.4GHZ 4GB RAM that I got when SR was introduced. Word 08 takes 18 sec to load after reboot and 8 seconds after i quit Word 08 and reload.
 
Thirteen bounces of the Dock icon for Word, twelve for Excel :eek: And then the toolbars don't actually fill with icons for another maybe 15 seconds. Back to iWork we go...
 
Office 2008 a Slow Starter......

I just installed Office 2008 and I takes a verrrry long time for any of the
Office apps to launch. After some digging I found this article in the MS support
site that explains some of the troubleshooting you can perform.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892959

I've tried the first one and it did work in safemode(all apps launch at normal speeds).
But once I launch in normal mode the apps are slow again.

Not sure what to do after to fix the problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks:confused:

Specs:
MacPro - Leopard, Quad 2.66, 3GB Ram, 250GB HD.
 
This may work for you, it did for me.
Word 2008 was taking nearly 2 minutes to load. I opened remove office. Fully removed office 2008.
Reinstalled it. Left it until the setup assistant opened, ignored that. Opened Onyx, fixed permissions, optimized whole system, ran maintainence scripts. Now it open 1 minutes. After quitting and then re-opening, it takes 15seconds.

Hope this helps.
 
I noticed that Office 2008 is faster on Leopard than on Tiger. Last week, I installed Office on my iMac C2D 2.0 ghz with 2.5 gig ram and Tiger 10.4.11. It ran ok. I'm not as much interested in load times as I am on how the programs actually run while loaded. In particular, I use Powerpoint a lot. I previously used Office 2004. Powerpoint was always a dog, even when running natively on my G4. Powerpoint was a major dog on my iMac C2D 2.0 while using Tiger 10.4.11 with 2.5 gig ram. Then, I installed Office 2008 on Tiger. It was a lot faster than Office 2004. Powerpoint still isn't a blazer, but at least now it's highly useable. Then, I decided it was time to upgrade to Leopard. I did just an upgrade install, and the speed of Office 2008 was visually noticeble. Perhaps it's because Office 2008 makes use of the new Leopard APIs. Maybe it's because Leopard is better at using two cores than Tiger. I'm not sure. Then, after tyring out Leopard for a bit, I decided to do a full erase and install. Office 2008 is even faster yet. Powerpoint is very nice. I'm not too into the counting of dock bounces or load times, but Office 2008 is very useable on Leopard. It doesn't affect my productivity, which is all that matters to me. Office 2004 on my Intel iMac did affect my productivity.
 
I did a clean install of leopard over the weekend and reinstalled Office 08. I used xSlimmer to remove the extra languages from Office and the Font Book. I then used Onyx to optimize the system. Rebooted and launched Word. It took 22 seconds from click to blank page. That amounts to an 8 second improvement over my initial time. I still think that is a bit long.
 
ibmman69 said:
I did a clean install of leopard over the weekend and reinstalled Office 08. I used xSlimmer to remove the extra languages from Office and the Font Book. I then used Onyx to optimize the system. Rebooted and launched Word. It took 22 seconds from click to blank page. That amounts to an 8 second improvement over my initial time. I still think that is a bit long.
Click to expand...

Pretty much exactly my launch time too. I had this time both before and after Onyx though, not convinced that it had any effect.

I agree it's a little bit long. Excel takes around 6 seconds, why does the difference arise!
 
tibi08 said:
Pretty much exactly my launch time too. I had this time both before and after Onyx though, not convinced that it had any effect.

I agree it's a little bit long. Excel takes around 6 seconds, why does the difference arise!
Click to expand...

Excel took the same time for me. I really thought removing the languages and fonts would make a bigger difference.

Pages takes about 6.5 seconds.
 
MacBook Pro C2D 2.4 w/4GB of RAM

Initial start up time for Word 2008 after a reboot is 12 seconds. Quiting the program and starting it back up, takes less than 5 seconds.

The whole Office 2008 Suite is much faster than Office 2004 on the same MacBook Pro. In fact, Office 2004 was such a pain and slow to use, I used NeoOffice. I'm quite happy with Office 2008.
 
Does anybody have comparative 2004/8 launch times on PPC G4 machines? I wonder if office 2008 is at all usable on those.
 
Start up aside, how about performance and quality?

So far, Word has crashed a couple of times, and typing is still king of sluggish.
 
nsbio said:
Does anybody have comparative 2004/8 launch times on PPC G4 machines? I wonder if office 2008 is at all usable on those.
Click to expand...

On my PowerMac running 10.5.1, I'm getting:
Pages '08: 9s/8s
Word 2004: 10s/5s

Installing 2008 now, so I'll have numbers for that in a bit.

Word 2008: 25s/17s
 
I think the difference in performance could be due to the install and if there were any previous Office Files/install on the machine. I installed mine on a fresh Leopard Install with no previous Office Files and I'm having zero issues and my experience with 2008 has been a lot better compared to 2004. Just my .02 cents.
 
Yeah my MacBook is having a pretty hard time loading it up... it takes a good 30 secs or more every time...
 
Hey,
I had this problem as well. Start up would take about 1 minute. I have completely fixed the problem.

It seems as though the office programs hang on startup due to 2 reasons.
The first being the auto start up of the project gallery and the second is the way it renders the preview of fonts(I use "Font Book" to preview my fonts anyhow.).

Here is how to fix it:

1. Launch word
2. Go to Word>Preferences
3. Click on "General"
4. uncheck "WYSIWYG font and style menus"
5. uncheck "Show Project Gallery At Startup"
6. Quit word
7. Reopen Word

My office programs now boot in 4 seconds and run smoothly.

Your Welcome :)

Visit my blog for the a more in depth tutorial http://bbold.com/blog/apple/speed-up-microsoft-office-2008-for-mac/
 
Here's the straight dope on Office 2008 load times: it's almost entirely due to the way Office 2008 manages fonts. If you have more than a hundred or so fonts active, your load time will be slow slow slow. And by the way, the more fonts you have active, the more RAM it chews up. This is why there are such huge differences in startup times in this thread; those who have fast startups most likely have very few fonts activated.

Instead of engineering Office:Mac ground up for the Mac, the Redmond brain trust just adapted Windows code. Which means they created an entirely non-Apple font management process. This was the case in prior versions as well, but with the bloat of all the snazzy (and relatively useless) new features, the problem is more pronounced in the 2008 version. So each time an Office program starts up, it runs through a font management routine, and the more fonts you have, the longer it takes. Period.

The *only* way you can mitigate this problem is to reduce the number of active fonts, using FontBook or Linotype FontExplorer, or other font utility. Turning off the WYSIWYG font menu will buy you a bit of speed, but not much.

After you've deactivated fonts, you'll need to clean out your font caches:

Quit all Office applications, trash the Office Font Cache (Home/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (12)

Delete the System and User Font Caches
Quit all Office applications and drag whichever of the following files are present to the trash. Reboot, and then empty the trash.
- Com.apple.ATS.plist (Home/Library/Preferencess)
- Com.apple.ATS/ (/Library/Caches)
- FontTablesAnnex (/System/Library/Caches)
- All other files whose names include .ATS or Font found in /System/Library/Caches

You may see advice in other forums suggesting you trash the Office Font Cache Tool. This is a very bad idea, don't do it. Nothing will work, and you'll have to reinstall.
 
I ordered 2 GB of RAM for my Macbook which currently only has 1 GB of default memory that came with it. So hopefully Office 2008 will launch faster.

Also has anyone else tried the above steps of deleting the font preferences?
 
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