I think it could well be worth following Daiya's suggestions
Sorry, I can't address the EPS bug: it is a known bug, and all you can do is
delete the pictures and put them back in using Word 2008.
Word 2008 is actually a bit of a slug. Word 2004 will easily outrun it on
most Intel machines (even this wimpy little MacBook that I am using).
However, vigorous use of Tracked Changes will kill performance in any
version of Word, but particularly in Word 2004. I work in long (more than
1,000-page...) complex documents, and I would always disable Tracked Changes
(and Accept All Changes in the Document).
Having done that, save the document in XML and then re-open it. You should
get a solid boost in speed.
When I have finished editing, I then use Compare Document to mark the
differences between the original and the new version. It gives exactly the
same effect, but the speed and stability improvements are huge.
I agree that Word 2007 running in Vista on this MacBook will easily out-pace
either flavour of Mac Word. This should not be so, and I have pungently
explained this to Microsoft, at some length
I hope you will do so too: Send the bottom bit of your post in, using
Help>Send Feedback! That gets to a Microsoft staff member directly: this
forum does not.
I also agree with your comments about the Word 2007 user interface. It does
take some getting used to, but it's well ahead of what we have on the Mac so
far (in my never-humble opinion....).
I also know that one of the design goals of PC Office in the 2007 release
was a performance improvement, and I was quite astonished at how much of a
boost they achieved. I had a beer or 23 with one of the developers who
worked on it, and I accused him of filling the code with in-line Assembly
language to get that speed boost! He denied it vigorously: he says most of
it is written in C++, and the rest in C#. He tells me the speed
improvements came mainly from architectural improvements, and in better use
of the Windows functions provided by Windows XP and Vista.
Believe me, the Macintosh Business Unit has taken note, and they have this
on their list for the next version
Hope this helps
I am supposed to be on the mailing list to be notified when the EndNote update
came out - apparently they didn't bother to inform me, thank you for that. I
will have to check.
On an Intel Mac there isn't much that can be done to speed up a PPC
application running under Rosetta. Word 08 is faster - 04 is very slow, and is
nearly unusable for any multi-page documents when "track changes" is enabled.
It uses huge amounts of system resources. I have a 2.4 ghz dual-core system
with 4 gigs or RAM. My MacBook can run anything I throw at it, but Office '04
kills performance. Running an emulated Windows install (either Parallels or
VirtualBox) + Office 07 gives me better performance than '04. I should not be
able to emulate a second operating system, run Office, and obtain better
performance than I do running an office build that was designed to work on a
Mac. Office '08 does perform better, it does use less system resources than
'04, but Word especially is simply not stable on a day-to-day basis.
At least one of my colleagues is seriously considering moving to the iWork
suite at this time. In his opinion it is currently superior to Mac Office.
While he does agree that Windows Office is better than the iWork suite, we
both agree that Mac Office has serious shortcomings, especially due to the
current crop of bugs (he has also been plagued by the EPS issue) and the
continually increasing lack of feature parity with the Windows version. If
Office 07 could be ported to the Mac I'd be perfectly happy. It works, it's
reliable, the user interface (although a bit weird at first) is really
well-designed - for a program suite with as many features as Office it is
surprisingly easy to find what I need, with minimal effort. I truly wish that
the Mac Office designers would find a way to bring the Office 07 interface to
OS X. It feels much more like a Mac program to me than Office 08 does. I don't
need a million floating toolbars, especially when most of the commonly-used
features are all packed into one auto-collapsing toolbox - 90% of the time it
helpfully hides the feature I need, pointlessly increasing the number of mouse
clicks necessary just to do something that is instantly accessible in Office
07.
I don't want this to turn into a rant, but I am growing increasingly
frustrated by just how good the Windows office suite has become in the latest
revision, and just how little of that code has made it to the Mac version. I'm
also amazed that, by and large, Mac users seem to just shrug and accept it. If
we didn't demand more, we wouldn't be using Macs, would we? It really appears
that Microsoft is putting in the bare minimum effort to keep Mac Office
afloat. There's no other reason I can think of to explain why a company with
Microsoft's resources and talent cannot produce an equivalent Office suite on
both platforms. If someone on the "inside" told me that the Mac BU has zero
interaction with the Windows Office team and is forced to re-create everything
from scratch, I wouldn't be surprised.
--
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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:
[email protected]