Beachballs: does MS Office 2016 slow down 4-yr-old iMac with 8GB RAM?

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Hello,
I thought I had posted this question earlier today, but can't find it so here goes again.

I have two iMacs (mid-2014 and late 2015). I upgraded the older one to High Sierra recently; the newer one (my main machine) is still running OS El Capitan 10.11.6. Both have 8GB RAM (original config).

I also have two MacBooks, one 2017 and the other a MB Air from 2014, both of which are running HS and have MS Office 2016 installed.

I have noticed an increase in beachballs since the changes and wonder if this is something that happens frequently when upgrading to HS, and/or installing MS Office 2016 on machines with limited memory.

I meant to switch to High Sierra on my main machine as well, but am now worried. Nevertheless, I did install the MS Office suite on it, and getting beachballs without HS, so maybe Microsoft is the culprit?

Or could there be another explanation?

Thanks in advance

Ann
 

chscag

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There is no question that MS Office 2016 uses more resources than previous versions of Office and takes up a large amount of space on your hard drives. With that said, beach balls can be caused by other factors. How full are the drives on the machines which are affected? Have you run First Aid on the drives? (from recovery using Disk Utility) If anything, High Sierra should make more efficient use of the memory you have. It certainly wouldn't hurt to add memory to your main iMac but 8 GB should be sufficient for most things.
 
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Thanks chscag for your reply.

Did not know about that large use of resources with the new Office suite, since I had been happily running Office 2008 for the past decade... I do not really need all the new bells and whistles of Office 2016, but thought it was time to switch, what with Apple operating systems possibly making the earlier one obsolete. Maybe I misjudged the situation...

On our iMacs, storage capacity (hard disks) is not an issue. They are both very, or very very, far from full (forgot to mention that on the previous post). Have not run First Aid yet as the beachball problem is not acute.

I had earlier read that High sierra should be more efficient, that's why I was so surprised when the beachballs started to appear again (I say again because I had an earlier issue with a previous iMac which had only 4 GB but I was able to upgrade that one to 8 GB with new memory sticks).

I also did not indicate that my main iMac is one of those where it is impossible to add more memory. What you see is what you get! The other one (nominally my husband's machine) does allow memory upgrade. Both cost the same, it's just Apple's policy changed in the meantime.

Indeed, I had anticipated that 8 GB would be sufficient for most of what I need.

My bottom line at this point is that High Sierra won't change much in terms of beachballs, which may well be associated more with MS Office. So I may upgrade my OS one of these days on my computer, as I have on the three others.

Crossing my fingers!

Thanks,

Ann
 

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