EXCEL (Office 2008) running slowly, freezing?

Hi everyone:

I have not used EXCEL much since I was using Office 2004. I now run Office 2008.

Today my boss and I were looking at plots in EXCEL (Office 2008) on separate computers (both Macs, OS 10.6.2). On both computers, EXCEL was extremely slow and it kept crashing. We were looking at different plots and we even created new plots, so the problem is not that the plots are corrupted. The versions of Office that we have were installed from separate sources. We are concerned because we are going to need to use EXCEL a lot from now on.

I would very much appreciate any advice about this problem... Has anyone heard whether there are problems with EXCEL plots in Office 2008? If the are known problems, are there any fixes? Any other tips/advice?

Thanks a lot!

What do you mean by different sources ??
Was it 2 separate copies of Office 2008 ?
I havnt heard of any problems with Plots in itself but Office 2008 there are complaints out there saying it isnt as responsive and as quick as 2004.
Maybe repair disk permissions 1st and see where that brings us too.
Might be your system needs a little clean out.

Cheers

Hi TattooedMac:

Thanks a lot for your reply.

By "separate sources", I mean that I installed Office 2008 from one dvd and my boss installed it from a separate dvd. My boss has a new computer. I did a repair disk permissions on my machine and that didn't change anything.

On both machines, EXCEL is so slow, that we can't manipulate the plots at all. It takes about 5 minutes of the spinning wheel just to highlight anything! I have noticed that Word runs quite slowly too.

Thanks again!

Ok .. That was my next question, does word run slow ??

Hmmm more thought i will put into it as i run Word, Excel and PowerPoint on my 2008 White MacBook and i dont have any of tat lag you have talked about. Mind you i have upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 4GB and now everything i run is like a Cheeta ..
Lightening fast IMO.
How much RAM are in each of yours?? It might be part of the problem.
You might even want to try and trash them using the Apps own uninstaller and re install them.
You havnt said either if this problem has just risen, or its been like it since you installed the App, ad how long it has been installed ....

Just the more info you can give us the better your chance of success around here. If i cant figure it out someone here might be able to with added info

Cheers

EDIT : has Office got all of its updates on it as well ??

Thanks TattooedMac...

My boss has a brand new, juiced-up Mac Pro. We only installed Office 2008 this week! I have a Macbook that is 18 months old, with 4 GB of memory and a 2.4 GHz processor.

I have had problems with Word and EXCEL on my machine right from the start. I reinstalled Office 2008 once a few months ago, but the same thing happened and I gave up. Word randomly quits and it doesn't like documents that are longer than about 10 pages.

Yes, we have checked that both machines have all updates.