Ms Office 2008 / 2004 + Mac

Hello

Im frustrated. I bought this mac for the university, where I was expecting to do lots of MS office work and I realise that both 2008 and 2004 work extremely sluggish and "crappy". Seriously, if you have MS Office 2004, try the difference between typing on TextEdit (the app with MAC OSX) and on WORD. THE DIFFERENCE IS SCARY!!! THE SECOND ONE WORKS EXTREMELY SLUGGISH!!!

is there any way of solving this issue?? laptop is clean since i formatted last week. furthermore, dont you feel OS X runs sluggish as well?? i mean, window transitions, effects and so on

thanks

There's a few points to be made here.

Firstly, Office 2004 is a PowerPC based application, meaning when you run it on your shiney new Intel Mac, it has to run through an emulation API called Rosetta, which translates PPC code to 8086 code, which resultes in significant slowdown.

Office 2008 is a Universal application, meaning it can execute native Intel code (as well as PPC code) so this issue does not occur. Having said that, Office 2008 is still slow, mainly thanks to Microsoft's bloaty code, however the latest update (12.2.1 I think) makes some huge improvements.

Comparing Office with Text-Edit though it a bit like comparing a moped with a 747 Jet Airliner... the former might seem a bit nippier, but in reality the comparison is not really even worth doing.

Finally, on OS X's overall performance. Sometimes when I go back to XP, and launch excel or open explorer, it seems very quick. But then, this is an 8 year old OS, running on modern hardware, launching apps that are only a few MBs in size. When you look at productivity (for example, how long it takes to get a photo from a camera onto an email), the Mac system always wins hands down. There is a difference between productivity, and perceived onscreen 'speed'.

i think ill have to put up with the office performance.

However, ive seen people with older mac versions (i think it was tiger, the one before OSX) and all the effects and window transitions look extremely smooth and nice. However, mine looks really stutter-ish.

ist this common with all macbooks?

jolulure said:

i think ill have to put up with the office performance.

However, ive seen people with older mac versions (i think it was tiger, the one before OSX) and all the effects and window transitions look extremely smooth and nice. However, mine looks really stutter-ish.

ist this common with all macbooks?

Click to expand...

Tiger is OS X, version 10.4, just to be clear. OS X covers 10.x.x

I noticed that the dock became jerky on my MacBook after upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, but this was fixed in the 10.5.1 update. Can you check your Leopard version? I am on an old MacBook too, a Core Duo with GMA950 GPU, so if yours is newer than Jan 2007, you should have even better performance. How much RAM do you have?

thanks for your reply

ive got version 10.5.2. Ive got a 2,4Ghz Core 2 Duo + 2gb RAM. Its the middle version between the basic white macbook and the black macbook.

However dont you notice the effects are really jerky, especially in "EXPOSÉ" (all windows show up) or with "ALADINO" (Windows minimize)??

cos i can notice quite a lot of stutter...

The genie effect never stutters, although Exposé does if I open more than 18 windows (yes I tested it). Did you definitely download the Leopard gfx update after 10.5.1?

what do you mean by GFX?? you mean geforce? no, ive got the integrated intel x3100.

my OSX version is 10.5.4, which i donwloaded yesterday with automatic updates program.

is there any other tweaks,mods,patches or updates that could solve this problem??

jolulure said:

what do you mean by GFX?? you mean geforce? no, ive got the integrated intel x3100.

my OSX version is 10.5.4, which i donwloaded yesterday with automatic updates program.

is there any other tweaks,mods,patches or updates that could solve this problem??

Click to expand...

gfx is short for Graphics. Your animations should not be jerky. So if you boot up clean, open one finder window and minimize it, the animation is jerky?

not with one window. maybe with 4 or more you can feel quite a noticeable "jerkyness". i mean is quite noticeable, relly jerky. something like 10 fps in a game.

office 04 works fine for me, not bad. have you updated it? there are updates not included on the original cd. run the update app.

yes all updated. however, dont you notice as if the typing lagged?? compare the speed at which you tipe in safari or other apps with the one in MS WORD.... dont you feel is extremely laggy??

may it be my laptop?

jolulure said:

yes all updated. however, dont you notice as if the typing lagged?? compare the speed at which you tipe in safari or other apps with the one in MS WORD.... dont you feel is extremely laggy??

may it be my laptop?

Click to expand...

Forget about Office '04, yes it's laggy, I explained this above. Office 2008 shouldn't be though.

I don't notice lag on Exposé with only a few windows, and you shouldn't either. The smoothness of the animation is pretty much down to the memory you have available to the GPU, so unless something is hogging the memory, it should work fine.

ok, do the following:

reboot mac

open finder and itunes....run exposé.... smooth?

now open safary, mail and itunes and perform "exposé" a few times... dont you feel its not smooth?

thanks!