From bad to worse

[PeterD.]

Microsoft Powerpoint under 10.4 with an Intel Mac is terrible.
How can Microsoft claim that Office "runs well" ?

Larger 250 MB Presentations take 20 minutes to load - NO SERIOUSLY!
Have tried Office X and Office 2004. I opened a trouble ticket on this
when OS 10.4 was released and now with an Intel Mac it is worse than it
was previously.

Microsoft blaming Mac for a new OS....Apple blaming Microsoft for a
crappy product. Sorry but at this point, Microsoft should have patched
this.

Moving back to 10.3 solved the issue previously - the same
presentations open in roughtly a minute or two but now with the intel
Mac this is not possible.

When will Microsoft FIX THIS!!!!!

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

From what I've read, until software vendors release Mac/Intel-native versions
of their apps, you can expect things to run somewhat slower; there's an extra
emulation/translation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it layer of software in theres.

Wasn't it Jobs himself who said that until Adobe releases the M/I native
version of Photoshop and Illustrator, graphics professionals will want to stick
with MacMotorola boxes?

Not to belittle the problem mind you ... you're not the first to report
slow-opening files under newer versions of PPT, MacOSX.

Larger 250 MB Presentations take 20 minutes to load - NO SERIOUSLY!
Have tried Office X and Office 2004. I opened a trouble ticket on this
when OS 10.4 was released and now with an Intel Mac it is worse than it
was previously.

Microsoft blaming Mac for a new OS....Apple blaming Microsoft for a
crappy product. Sorry but at this point, Microsoft should have patched
this.

Moving back to 10.3 solved the issue previously - the same
presentations open in roughtly a minute or two but now with the intel
Mac this is not possible.

When will Microsoft FIX THIS!!!!!

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Andrew Chiang [MSFT]]

Hello PeterD,

I'm sorry to hear of your performance issues when running on an Intel based
Mac. I'm going to need more information as there seem to be a couple
factors here but I may be able to help.

First off, we have no plans to re-release Office 2004 for Intel-based Macs.
It's outlined in our Q&A at
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=macIntelQA. For apps to be
Universal Binaries to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel, the app needs
to be built using XCode and tested on both platforms which is a very large
task.

For some insight into this, see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/03/24/560461.aspx
http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html

Secondly, I'm going to need more info as it seems that you're talking about
at least two different machines here. Can you give me some details about
your Intel based Mac and the PowerPC machine(s) running OS 10.3.x and
10.4.x? I'm mainly looking for processor (G3, G4, G5, etc.), clock speed
and very importantly, amount of RAM.

Are you saying that on the exact same machine that was running 10.3 w/no
hardware changes that when booting into 10.4 and loading the identical file
w/the identical version of PowerPoint that there was a huge difference? If
so, then there's possibly something else going on here.

On the machines/configurations where it's slow, is anything else chewing up
CPU time while you're trying to open the presentation? You can take a look
by going to Applications/Activity Monitor, selecting All Processes from the
dropdown at the top and then clicking on % CPU to sort by CPU usage.

With the Intel based Mac, if you only have say 512 megs of RAM, that's a bit
low and you may be paging (swapping to/from disk) heavily. My post at
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...fbc57689?q=chiang+ram&rnum=1#07bf15b3fbc57689
can help you determine if that's the case.

To summarize, providing stats like the example below would really help.
PowerMac G4 933 mhz, 1 gb of RAM, OS 10.3.9, PowerPoint 2004 11.2.3, open
file mybigfile.ppt: xxx seconds
PowerMac G4 933 mhz, 1 gb of RAM, OS 10.4.6, PowerPoint 2004 11.2.3, open
file mybigfile.ppt: yyy seconds
Intel iMac 2 ghz Core Duo, 1 gb of RAM, OS 10.4.6, PowerPoint 2004 11.2.3,
open file mybigfile.ppt: zzz seconds

Since the file you have in question is so large, if ZIPping it makes it
considerably smaller, I would like a copy of it to see if there is something
in there that's causing it to take so long. If you need to email me, remove
the online. portion from my address. It would be useful for us in
benchmarking and improving performance of future versions.

As a side note, since you mentioned a trouble ticket, I'd be curious to know
the number of the service request.

Andrew

 

[PeterD.]

OK
1st machine 1Ghz G4 1 GB ram ran really slow when upgrading to OSX10.4
and Office 2004. Would take a long time to open slides in many
different (albeit large) applications.
Going back to 10.3 and Office 2004 there were issues with audio
synchronization.

Apple tested this on several of their machines with engineering and
agreed - blamed Microsoft.

Microsoft tested this as well....blamed Apple's new OSX10.4 operating
system.
Boss went back to using 10.3 and Office X where things opened super
fast.

OK and also should note that these presentations open fine even on our
slower PCs.

The boss had problems with his old machine so he bought:
2nd machine - Intel Mac 2.0 Ghz with 1 GB memory.

Tested with Office 2004 and Office X - both are slower than molasses in
Alaska.

It may be interesting to note that he had to go back to 10.4 to recover
data on his machine. Powerpoint from Office X runs faster on this then
I remember it having done in the past. Also I remember disabling
Spotlight seemed to help - not sure if this is disabled in his other
machine that is limping along because he has that one on the road and I
am troubleshooting the new one.

The last time I tried to deal with this, we uploaded to the server as
over 10MB our e-mail is not too happy.

Quote from Microsoft website:
Q. Will you re-release Office 2004 for Intel-based Macs?

A. No. There are no plans to re-release Office 2004. With Rosetta,
Office 2004 runs well on Intel-based Macs.

OK - so maybe there is another issue - that would certainly make
everyone happy.

 

[Dave Fritzinger]

OK
1st machine 1Ghz G4 1 GB ram ran really slow when upgrading to OSX10.4
and Office 2004. Would take a long time to open slides in many
different (albeit large) applications.
Going back to 10.3 and Office 2004 there were issues with audio
synchronization.

Apple tested this on several of their machines with engineering and
agreed - blamed Microsoft.

Microsoft tested this as well....blamed Apple's new OSX10.4 operating
system.
Boss went back to using 10.3 and Office X where things opened super
fast.

OK and also should note that these presentations open fine even on our
slower PCs.

The boss had problems with his old machine so he bought:
2nd machine - Intel Mac 2.0 Ghz with 1 GB memory.

Tested with Office 2004 and Office X - both are slower than molasses in
Alaska.

It may be interesting to note that he had to go back to 10.4 to recover
data on his machine. Powerpoint from Office X runs faster on this then
I remember it having done in the past. Also I remember disabling
Spotlight seemed to help - not sure if this is disabled in his other
machine that is limping along because he has that one on the road and I
am troubleshooting the new one.

The last time I tried to deal with this, we uploaded to the server as
over 10MB our e-mail is not too happy.

Quote from Microsoft website:
Q. Will you re-release Office 2004 for Intel-based Macs?

A. No. There are no plans to re-release Office 2004. With Rosetta,
Office 2004 runs well on Intel-based Macs.

OK - so maybe there is another issue - that would certainly make
everyone happy.

I had a thread going on a comparison of speed between PP vX and 2004
about a month ago. Now, I can't comment on the issue of OSX version, as
I upgraded both OSX (from 10.3 to 10.4) and Office (from vX to 2004) at
the same time. However, I noticed a very large slow-down on 2 machines.
I have a PM G5/2.0 (RevA, 1 Gig) at work, and a iBook G3/700 (256 Meg)
at home. Powerpoint X ran acceptably on the iBook, and very quickly on
the PM. However, after upgrading both the system software and Office,
the exact same slideshow ran very slowly on the PM, and like molasses
in January on the iBook.