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Why is Microsoft Office so abysmally slow on OS X?

M

mach

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 5, 2007
163
123
It's lightning fast on XP and Vista, and even though I love the new Office 2008 interface, it still takes around ~20 seconds to open Word or Entourage, and it loads fonts slowly (lags when opening the font menu in Word, for example), on a 2.4 GHz Santa Rosa Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM. Anyone know why, or know anything I can do to optimize its performance?
 
Basically Microsoft have cross-ported large sections of the code, which were originally written to be optimised for Windows APIs. Don't bother with Office for Mac unless you really have to.
 
I'm glad I didn't buy it, instead I was able to get it from my IT department for free. It is practically unusable, IMO. Thanks for the help.
 
its not that bad after start, plus you have 2G memory. Which is normal, since most leopard ppl have 2G+ RAM anyway.
 
I hate it. I used Numbers and Pages, then though I would give Office a try because someone else was wanting some help on it. It the past I could just click on an Excel spreadsheet attachment from an email and it would practically open instantly, now when it uses Excel it takes forever to load.

- James
 
I always try and avoid Office 2008, I even run a VM of XP just so I can use Office 2007 if I need. I find iWork 08 a lot better than office though.
 
I have Office v. X. I bought it back when I got my first Mac, around 2003. It loads somewhat slow, but once it's loaded it runs fine. I've never been enough of a Word or Excel "poweruser," if such a term can be applied to these apps, to want to purchase Office 2k4 or 2k8. I suppose the only issue *might* be compatibility with files created in 2k8, etc.
 
Lone Deranger said:
Because they (MS) want you to run it under Windows ofcourse. More $$ for them.
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Perhaps a better question is why does the Vista version run so fast? I'd guess its because MS spends more money on a product that sells 10X better (?) and whos developers work for the same company.
 
It is faster than 2004, but not enough. iWork works beautifully, but my whole school is ran of Microsoft products so nothing else really helps. Bummer...
 
Turn off font previews (WYSIWYG font and style menus). That caused it to load a little faster after I turned that of.
 
i have Pages and Word installed on my mbp (2.33 c2d 2 gig ram) and the load time for Word/Excel/Entourage is ~3 seconds, for Pages it's ~1 second according to my watch. i'm not sure why you're getting a 20 sec load time :confused: have you downloaded their Service Pack 1 for Office? that may help some...

otherwise my only other suggestion is to go to the MacBU blogs and ask them directly...awhile ago one of their people used to post in here too...
 
I dont know but mine is very fast! Same speed as Office 2007 on Windows (using Office 08).
 
benzslrpee said:
i have Pages and Word installed on my mbp (2.33 c2d 2 gig ram) and the load time for Word/Excel/Entourage is ~3 seconds, for Pages it's ~1 second according to my watch. i'm not sure why you're getting a 20 sec load time :confused: have you downloaded their Service Pack 1 for Office? that may help some...

otherwise my only other suggestion is to go to the MacBU blogs and ask them directly...awhile ago one of their people used to post in here too...
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I call ********. I have Office 2008 installed on my Macbook AND my Mac Pro (early 2008) and it's around 15-20 seconds from a cold start on both. 3 seconds on the Mac Pro maybe from a warm start, but no way it's that fast from a cold start.
 
I despise the 15 sec load time as well. I still have to use Office because of the Merge Data function. If Pages and Numbers would empoly this, then I would be Office Free!!
 
I think a lot depends on how many fonts you have. I don't have many and find Word and the rest of Office runs fantastically well (under 5 seconds load time on iMac 3.06 with 4GB ram and not much more on my MBA SSD)
I've seen a lot of complaints about Office 2008, but I absolutely love it: Entourage is superb when coupled with an Exchange back end and Word and Excel are much better than their Office 2007 counterparts (mainly because I loathe the ribbon interface in Office 2007 with a passion)
I purchased iWork 08 for my Mac Pro because Office 2008 wasn't out but I haven't bothered with it on either my MBA or my iMac because I much prefer Office 2008
 
Phil A. said:
I think a lot depends on how many fonts you have. I don't have many and find Word and the rest of Office runs fantastically well (under 5 seconds load time on iMac 3.06 with 4GB ram and not much more on my MBA SSD)
I've seen a lot of complaints about Office 2008, but I absolutely love it: Entourage is superb when coupled with an Exchange back end and Word and Excel are much better than their Office 2007 counterparts (mainly because I loathe the ribbon interface in Office 2007 with a passion)
I purchased iWork 2007 for my Mac Pro because Office 2008 wasn't out but I haven't bothered with it on either my MBA or my iMac because I much prefer Office 2008
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How many is not many? I don't have much installed on my MBP (not sure where else fonts come from) and it takes 30s to load Word 08...
 
Full of Win said:
Perhaps a better question is why does the Vista version run so fast? I'd guess its because MS spends more money on a product that sells 10X better (?) and whos developers work for the same company.
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From the (admittedly little) I've heard about the Mac Business Unit, they are pretty hard-core Apple fanatics. It must be an ironic department to work in though.
 
jptelthorst said:
From the (admittedly little) I've heard about the Mac Business Unit, they are pretty hard-core Apple fanatics. It must be an ironic department to work in though.
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It is strange they didn't try to make their stuff load faster. People here complain but those people could do something about it. I wonder if it is just a training issue with their programming skills. It seems like all their programs for the Mac have issues or lack very advanced features like their messenger and remote (Beta forever) desktop.
 
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