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Why is Microsoft Office so abysmally slow on OS X?

BornAgainMac said:
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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I emailed Craig Eisler about this a long time ago. He was very courteous in his replies and seemed enthusiastic about progressing not only Office, but also developing a few other programs for Macs. He himself is a Mac user.

He forwarded my email to a few software engineers, who were supposedly going to get back to me regarding how to speed launch times. Of course they sent a few emails and then things just dropped off.

Perhaps everyone should email Eisler and remind him that it's not an isolated problem. He stated that it only took a few seconds to load on their computers at Microsoft FWIW.
 
dynamicv said:
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.
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Incorrect. The codebase is no longer shared. If it were, you could just as easily say this going the other way, because Office was originally for Macs.

G-Com said:
Mach, if you want a great alternative to Office, try NeoOffice
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Incorrect. NeoOffice isn't much faster than Office 2004 on an Intel Mac. OpenOffice.org's latest Mac OS X beta is far superior to NeoOffice. It might crash more, though.
 
In the time Word 2008 takes to load on Mac OS X, I can actually VNC into my Windows computer, open up Word 2007 and still have time to spare.

Loading times are getting better though with each update :)
 
dynamicv said:
Oh right. In that case let's throw the flawed FREE package in the Trashcan and pay £300 for an even more sub-standard offering from Microsoft :rolleyes:
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Don't take my statement out of context. You missed the most important part:

OpenOffice.org's latest Mac OS X beta is far superior to NeoOffice. It might crash more, though.
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southerndoc said:
I emailed Craig Eisler about this a long time ago. He was very courteous in his replies and seemed enthusiastic about progressing not only Office, but also developing a few other programs for Macs. He himself is a Mac user.

He forwarded my email to a few software engineers, who were supposedly going to get back to me regarding how to speed launch times. Of course they sent a few emails and then things just dropped off.

Perhaps everyone should email Eisler and remind him that it's not an isolated problem. He stated that it only took a few seconds to load on their computers at Microsoft FWIW.
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On a MacBook, 1.83GHz: I just updated to Office 2004 Version 11.5.0, and it seems to be faster now. First start maybe 18 seconds instead of 24, second start 3 seconds for Word. And there is always a long delay if you change any fonts in your system.
 
What gives here?

My Jan 2008 eight-processor, 3.2GHz Mac Pro just opened a blank document in MS Office 2008 Word in.................******_______++++++====== ..... 97 seconds!!!!!!!! Stopwatch timed, no other apps running.

My wife's computer is a 24" intel iMac from April 2008 and opens blank doc in Word 2008 in about 15 seconds, same preferences selected.

I'm flummoxed...
 
Because it has the word "Microsoft" in the title.

Your hard drive space and RAM isnt big enough to handle such an app.
Or try opening Activity Monitor and cancelling other apps that may be causing your mac to run slower than usual.
 
I installed Office 2008 on my Mac Pro, I have it say before the service pack it was very slow and sluggish. After the service pack there was a slight increase in speed but nothing amazing. With that in mind I tried iWork 08 and this works wonderfully, needless to say I got my money back from Office 2008, biggest piece of rubbish I've installed on my Mac.
 
southerndoc said:
Turn off font previews (WYSIWYG font and style menus). That caused it to load a little faster after I turned that of.
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Just registered to thank southerndoc. Office used to always take a good 30 seconds to load (from cold). Doing this trick has reduced that down to 2 seconds (from cold).

To do it, open Word, in the Word menu, click Preferences (or Cmd+,) click the General icon, and untick the item 'WYSIWYG font and style menus'. This stops font previews from loading in the drop-down font menu, and the whole thing suddenly runs at a decent speed.

Thanks!! :D

Edit: I am running MS Office 2008, by the way.
 
Last edited:
My startup times for Office 2011 on MBP 2011 13" i5 with 8GB:

Word: 2.5 secs
Excel: 5 secs
Powerpoint: 3 secs

And now the interesting bit:

Pages: 11 secs
Number 9 secs

All checked just now under identical operating conditions.

Make of it what you will!
 
Here is the secret sauce. When Word starts up, you get a message near the bottom of the window about a 'font optimizer' running. That is what causes the delay. At least in Word '04. Just toss one support file.

Go to: applications>microsoft>office>office support files>fontcache tool.
Just remove the fontcache tool from its folder and Word will startup in 1/3 the time.

I noticed a delay when changing fonts from the Font pulldown menu (in Word), but who cares?
 
mach said:
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?
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Same reason it's so painful to use iTunes in Windows!
 
Microsoft sells many more copies of office for windows, plus they'd rather not promote the Mac platform over the windows platform because they sell windows.

I'm happy that the current version of office is a solid stable product who's performance is decent and a big addition is VBA, I did not buy the last version of Mac Office for this very reason.
 
Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I thought I'd addressed most of my Office speed issues (by moving to the latest MBP and installing a SSD) but I'm encountering a new issue. I've only just noticed it, but it may have started since installing the SSD, or maybe an Office update in that last four months.

The problem occurs with word documents that have tables containing .png graphics. The graphics don't show up at all unless I scroll to the page where they are placed, and then I have to wait a considerable time for them to appear (like 1-2 minutes per image).

They are nothing more that 100 kb B&W images. They used to show up fairly promptly in Word, albeit with a slight delay. They show up instantly when the same .doc file is opened in Pages.

Any thoughts?
 
jacg said:
Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I thought I'd addressed most of my Office speed issues (by moving to the latest MBP and installing a SSD) but I'm encountering a new issue. I've only just noticed it, but it may have started since installing the SSD, or maybe an Office update in that last four months.

The problem occurs with word documents that have tables containing .png graphics. The graphics don't show up at all unless I scroll to the page where they are placed, and then I have to wait a considerable time for them to appear (like 1-2 minutes per image).

They are nothing more that 100 kb B&W images. They used to show up fairly promptly in Word, albeit with a slight delay. They show up instantly when the same .doc file is opened in Pages.

Any thoughts?
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I experience the same issue. I switched the Pages 90% of the time but then tried out the subscription based Office 2013 on Windows. That version of office is very fast and makes me want to consider just using Windows for Office documents.
 
If there's no fix for my version of Word, I'm certainly not forking out for a subscription. Just another nail in the coffin for a file format that's dead to me.
 
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