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Word 2004 slow as ever or is it just me?

M

Mtn Tamale

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2004
56
0
Denver, CO
I've had Word 2001, Word V.X, and now Word 2004, and generally I've seen bugs slowly wane, but is it just me, or is Word really slow? All these glowing reviews everywhere would make one think that Office 2004 was a blessing for Mac users...better than on a PC etc etc. But in each of the version I've had, Word can't seem to keep up with the most important function on a Wordprocessor...my keyboard and mouse input. Now I've had the various versions installed on an iMac G4 800mhz, an ALPbook 1.25, and an eMac 1gig, but I've continually had pretty bad responsiveness.

Does anyone else have this issue? The reviewers never seem to mention it. What I'm talking about exactly is that when doing any real wordprocessing like typing a paper, I regularly get cursor lag of up to 2 seconds, where I've typed an entire word or so, look at the screen and wonder where my word is, then it suddenly appears. This happens with the mouse cursor sometimes too.

Any suggestions? This is extremely annoying. I made my wife switch to the Mac, so now our whole house is Apple, and only this and printer driver issues keep getting me ear-fulls about why we didn't keep our one of our Dells.
 
I experience the same problem with Word 2004 on a Dual 2.0 G5. The lag is very frustrating.
 
Hmm, this is odd. Granted, word is in actuality a slow program, but the laggyness youre talking about vanished in this newest version. The typing keeps up with me as fast as I type and it doesnt really lag when selecting options or messing around a bit.

And I have the exact same iMac as your, so the machine shouldnt really be a huge difference.
 
Grammar Checking

I had the same problem. The performace of my Word v.X. improved a lot after disabling the Option "Grammatik während der Eingabe überprüfen" (shout be something like "Check grammar while typing") in Word->Options->Spelling&Grammar.
Hopefully this works for you too.
 
I used the Office 2004 Test Drive just to check out the new bloat--er, features (pointless by the way) and I didn't notice the problem of typing faster than it would display. This was a huge annoyance in Office .x. Worse was that when I couldn't see what I was typing anymore I made more mistakes. When my type would finally appear I'd back up to make corrections and it would autocorrect.

"Real" word processing, like typing a paper for school can be done easily in TextEdit if you're using APA style or something else that doesn't require footnotes on every page. People laugh at me when I suggest they use TextEdit and I don't know why. Because it's free? In that case I guess Word would have to be a zillion times better because it costs a zillion times more. We'll ignore the fact that the printed output will look the same.

Oh, and what printer driver problem are you referring to?
 
It seems OK on my 1.2ghz iBook, with iTunes, Safari, Entourage & Messenger running.
 
i didn't find any lag while typing in word 2004, but i did find the the load time with the splash screen took a bit longer. i upgraded my ram, and that helped a bit.
 
I've found that switching from Page Layout View to Normal View improves performance as well.
 
the only time i experience any lag is when it is checking for spelling and grammar as i type, if you disable these it should run much faster, also if you turn off auto correct it will speed things up a bit
 
I had no problems on my powerbook or G5 or iBook G3. It seemed as fast as the Windows version except for scrolling. The fast scrolling in Windows is more of a curse than a blessing. I wonder if it's a memory issue.
 
I have had zero problems with 2004 coming from v.X. The speed seems similar (to v.X) on my 17" iMac 1GHz 768MB RAM and on my 17" PB 1.33GHz 1GB RAM. The only difference (performance wise) I notice b/t the 2 is that when v.X was introduced it took about a year of updates from m$ to stop the program from unexpectedly quitting all of the time.......2004 has yet to quit on me.
 
Interesting...seems 2 to 1 slow vs. not slow

The real question is why is it different for different people? It clearly isn't hardware related.

Is grammar and spell checking really soooo slow that even on a Dual 2 G5 Word can have these responsiveness problems?

I'm going to turn those features off and retype part of a paper I finished last week and see what the deal is. But why don't reviewers discuss this? Clearly Word 2004 isn't superior to Word on Windows with this kind of sluggishness, if it is a flaw with Word.

Any other thoughts? I feel like this should be a big deal and get some exposure. MS should fix this if I'm not off base.
 
Typing seems way faster than with v.X for my Mac (TiBook 1GHz 768MB). Scrolling, however, is so freaking slow, and I've run into a more than a few frustrating bugs. I keep checking MS's website for a patch or update, but nothing yet. :(
 
Did you buy Word 2004 or did you download it off BitTorrent? I have seen both versions in action, and I find that the licensed version works much better. I'm not accusing you of anything; rather, I'm just saying that when I installed it from a Microsoft CD (legally), I've found that it runs faster, faster than X, and in fact, faster than the Windows version. I'm pretty impressed.

Mike LaRiviere
 
MikeLaRiviere said:
Did you buy Word 2004 or did you download it off BitTorrent? I have seen both versions in action, and I find that the licensed version works much better. I'm not accusing you of anything; rather, I'm just saying that when I installed it from a Microsoft CD (legally), I've found that it runs faster, faster than X, and in fact, faster than the Windows version. I'm pretty impressed.

Mike LaRiviere
Click to expand...

How exactly do you think that M$ can pull that off?
 
BTW I have Word 2004, but I usually end up using Word 98 because it runs a whole bunch faster (after classic has started up), though you have to pretty much turn off the dock to use it. At least there is a shortcut for that: Apple-Option-D.
 
Fully Licensed

Nope, all versions of Office have been fully licensed versions. In fact, I don't have any weird software hacks, or even much free or shareware for that matter on my systems. I certainly don't have anything that changes the Operating system or its behavior or appearance, except for Sharepoints.

So that isn't a factor in my case.
 
Is anyone using Entourage 2004? Is it any quicker than before?

I like Entourage's functionality, but the X.v version was incredibly slow at moving/deleting emails on my work Mac (450MHz graphite G4 with 1GB of SDRAM, so nothing great but still...)

I gave up and moved to Mail, which is infinitely snappier but the search facility is poor and the inability to display a 'cc column' is a major pain.
 
Fafnir said:
How exactly do you think that M$ can pull that off?
Click to expand...

I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft intended such a scheme. If, somehow, they did, I would be most impressed! However, I'm wondering if packaging the files, or perhaps simply these files in particular, caused some sort of misoptimization. I installed via the "Install" program; I didn't drag-and-drop. I'm curious as to whether this causes the discrepancy. Did users who find it slow drag-and-drop install? Did users who find it fast execute the install program?

Mike LaRiviere
 
Word 2004 was pretty slow for me as well - I tried turning off the "auto word count" feature (someone suggested this on a previous thread) and it speeded it up a little. But basically, for a word processor, Word 2004 is really sluggish and quite bloated in my experience. I actually switched back to Office X, since I don't use Entourage and the changes to Excel seemed minimal.

A few folks have written in that the 2004 version of Word has better support for foreign languages (including Japanese and Chinese), however, as an English language user I can't tell the difference between it and Word X.
 
Word 2004 has dissapointed me...

Really disgusting, I can't feel that inspired to use it most of the time as I thought I would before buying it, the only think that keeps Office 2004 in my iBook is Notebook, it has really helped me to write a lot of things and selecting chapters for my notes but the fact that it doesn't display the "audio flag" does SUCK :mad:, I mean, you have to go with the mouse and look where you recorded... it should be displayed as Notetaker does...

I have some data-sheets which contain some CAD pictures and those are not displayed correctly, but word X shows them :mad: , had to go back to word X just to be in time a report for a customer, windows office 2000 displays them, but my brand new office 2004 doesn't :eek:
 
MikeLaRiviere said:
Did users who find it slow drag-and-drop install? Did users who find it fast execute the install program?
Click to expand...

No, it's pretty slow for me and I used the install program on the disc.
 
Word and processor use...

Why the H*LL does word 2004 use ~10% of CPU if it has not been used since 4 hours ago... any idea?
 
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