office w/ 1.25 gig ram runs like crap

[ted94709]

hi, im using a 12" pb w/ 1.25 gigs of ram...which one would think is plenty. but as soon as i open an ppt file with ~40 slides and scroll through them, activity monitor shows that powerpoint is using 600+ megs of ram!!! that is ridiculous. even with very few other apps running, opening up one ppt file causes my pb to page out like crazy.

is there any way to stop powerpoint from caching every single thing to ram? i mean, its not like im afraid to use my ram, but just one file using up so much and paging out so much is totally a waste and unecessary. is this fixable or just another microsoftism?

i should have just stuck with open office.

thanks in advance.

 

[FuzzyBallz]

Yeah, but what kinda RAM did you put in that PB? Brand?

 

[blodwyn]

hi, im using a 12" pb w/ 1.25 gigs of ram...which one would think is plenty. but as soon as i open an ppt file with ~40 slides and scroll through them, activity monitor shows that powerpoint is using 600+ megs of ram!!! that is ridiculous. even with very few other apps running, opening up one ppt file causes my pb to page out like crazy.

I use Entourage and Powerpoint (Office 2K4) every day on my 12"PB with no speed problems, and I've only got 512Mb - although I don't keep an eye on the activity monitor or swap activity. Powerpoint does slow down a lot (Windows and Mac) if the pages have a high graphics content, could that be a factor?

 

[crazzyeddie]

40 pages of Powerpoint... how big is the ppt file? It must be at least 40MB. Then Powerpoint has to load all those images and decompress them.... 600MB for 40 pages might be a little overkill, but depending on the content, it might be right.

 

[homerjward]

a few years back i was working on extra credit project with another person (luckily w/ a copy of office) involving a 113 slide ppt, almost half images. we were working off a floppy until slide 60ish then i cant remember what we did...

 

[QCassidy352]

I always say that MS office apps run by far the worst of any app I have... stupid MS.

 

[grapes911]

I always say that MS office apps run by far the worst of any app I have... stupid MS.

Office works perfectly fine on my g3 800mhz ibook. I just can't have word, powerpoint, and excel open all at once.

 

[dswoodley]

Office 2004 works great on all my machines. Well...not exactly, Exchange syncing with Entourage is slow as hell. I use powerpoints of 30 slides plus each day for my lectures (graphics, animations, etc) no problems with speed, but it takes time to save and open and close.

 

[Abstract]

Forget the number of slides.

If your PPt presentation is big, then it should take up a large amount of RAM, although this doesn't quite sound right. 600 MB? how big is the file?

 

[dswoodley]

Forget the number of slides.

If your PPt presentation is big, then it should take up a large amount of RAM, although this doesn't quite sound right. 600 MB? how big is the file?

the more slides with a graphic background the larger the file size. But i've never the slow down like this poster is reporting

 

[kilpajr]

I bought the student version of Office 2004 at my bookstore. I have to say powerpoint is probably the slowest program I have right now. I think I actually load PDF files faster. I was trying to study the other night and accidentallly clicked on the slide sorter view. I had to wait a ridiculous amount of time for all slides to load. This is on top of the metafile conversions or whatever that took forever. I mean this isn't like rendering a Photoshop image or anything. What's the hold up?

Also, I have a question. Is there a way to open a file in Office 2004 without first creating a new document? I have just the Office Project Gallery launcher in my dock. It would be nice to just click on this and then select what file I want to load. Instead, I have to create a new word, excel, etc. file, select open and find the file I want, and then delete the new file that was created. I know there is the recent tab but what if I don't remember when I created the file and just want to search for it?

 

[kilpajr]

the more slides with a graphic background the larger the file size. But i've never the slow down like this poster is reporting

Why don't they have some kind of checksum or something at the beginning of each slide in a file for the background image? Then, when a file was opened, if it had all slides with the same background it could load just the extra stuff for each slide after the first since all other slides would have the same background. Maybe it does something like this already, but if it does, it is still way too slow.

 

[Fukui]

hi, im using a 12" pb w/ 1.25 gigs of ram...which one would think is plenty. but as soon as i open an ppt file with ~40 slides and scroll through them, activity monitor shows that powerpoint is using 600+ megs of ram!!! that is ridiculous. even with very few other apps running, opening up one ppt file causes my pb to page out like crazy.

is there any way to stop powerpoint from caching every single thing to ram? i mean, its not like im afraid to use my ram, but just one file using up so much and paging out so much is totally a waste and unecessary. is this fixable or just another microsoftism?

i should have just stuck with open office.

thanks in advance.

Ever try Keynote?
I'll never go back to powerpoint unless something really and I mean really amazing happens to that thing.

 

[ted94709]

thanks for all the replies...in answer to a few questions:
my ram is from owc, pc2100. the slides i open are actually only about 20-30 megs large, but are mostly graphics content-very little text so i was thinking that might be a large factor like a previous poster mentioned. and yes slide sorter does take an especially long time to load.

maybe its perhaps ppt detects that i have quite a bit of free ram, and attempts to hog it all who knows, ill try reverting back to open office or try keynote as mentioned, as soon as i can get my hands on a copy. its just the paging that drives me crazy since it slows absolutely everything down!

thanks again for all the extra input!

 

[munkle]

Also, I have a question. Is there a way to open a file in Office 2004 without first creating a new document? I have just the Office Project Gallery launcher in my dock. It would be nice to just click on this and then select what file I want to load. Instead, I have to create a new word, excel, etc. file, select open and find the file I want, and then delete the new file that was created. I know there is the recent tab but what if I don't remember when I created the file and just want to search for it?

Why don't you just click on the file you want to load from Finder in the first place? And if you want to turn of the Office Project Gallery splash screen, click on Customise, and deselect 'Show Project Gallery at startup'. You can just open the file you want directly from the app then.

 

[wordmunger]

thanks for all the replies...in answer to a few questions:
my ram is from owc, pc2100. the slides i open are actually only about 20-30 megs large, but are mostly graphics content-very little text so i was thinking that might be a large factor like a previous poster mentioned. and yes slide sorter does take an especially long time to load.

20-30 MB per SLIDE, or per PPT file? If you're talking about each slide, then you've got to expect PPT to take up that much memory. You could open up each slide graphic in photoshop and save as a much smaller JPEG--the difference is not going to show up on a projector anyway.

 

[kilpajr]

Why don't you just click on the file you want to load from Finder in the first place? And if you want to turn of the Office Project Gallery splash screen, click on Customise, and deselect 'Show Project Gallery at startup'. You can just open the file you want directly from the app then.

Yeah, I was just trying to save space in my dock. I guess I'll just start opening the files from the finder but I'm just used to opening files from the app. I guess I just don't understand why they have a recent files tab but don't have a way to look for a file and open it.

 

[ted94709]

20-30 MB per SLIDE, or per PPT file? If you're talking about each slide, then you've got to expect PPT to take up that much memory. You could open up each slide graphic in photoshop and save as a much smaller JPEG--the difference is not going to show up on a projector anyway.

whoops, i meant per ppt FILE.