Has anyone noticed Word performance improvements with Tiger

[Parallel Prose]

Hi All,

I've been wondering if anyone has noticed any improvement in Word 2004's
miserable performance when moving to Tiger. Prevailing wisdom (sic) of the
MVPs here seems to hold that all Word performance problems are Apple's
problems, not Microsoft's. And I'm wondering if Apple fixed the issues in
Tiger.

Thanks a bunch,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

What are you referring to when you say "Word performance problems"?

 

[koengeter]

Hi Daiya,

Obviously, I can't speak for Nigel. But I would also like to learn
whether Word 2004's performance improved under Tiger. I have two issues
in mind, specifically. First, Word is sometimes slow in displaying
characters. It occasionally takes a second or so for a character to
appear after typing it. Second, Word is slow when scrolling. In
particular when using a srcoll-wheel mouse. These issues have been
discussed here at length. See the the following links, for instance:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...ce.word/browse_thread/thread/4f7e3576df1d633b
http://groups-beta.google.com/group...d23d6a4f6?q=word+slow&rnum=8#8460d3ed23d6a4f6

I think it was John McGhie in particular who made the point that part
of the problem is the OS. At one point he wrote: 'But the real fix is
for Word to get more efficient, and OS X to get better tuning. I guess
we will just have to wait for Apple and Microsoft to do their thing.'

So the question really is: 'Did Apple do its thing...?'

Greetings,
Matthias

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi Daiya,

Matthias beat me too it - thanx Matthias :*)

I am referring to the performance problems that have been copiously
documented here regarding scrolling or paging through a document, especially
one with lots of changes being tracked and with grammar and spell checking
switched on. But also data entry slowness, in documents with similar
characteristics.

If I'm not mistaken, these symptoms were attributed to Microsoft's change
from using Quickdraw to ATSUI, as discussed in John McGhie's post here:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word/browse_
thread/thread/39f310365ac8ee5b/c07f0cfa9f3aeecd?q=ATSUI&rnum=2&hl=en#c07f0cf
a9f3aeecd

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, as I'm wondering whether I should
move to Tiger sooner rather than later.

Thanks,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Right, the screen display/refresh set of problems. Just wanted to make
sure.

I haven't a clue myself, as I'm not on Tiger and not planning to switch
anytime soon--but I mostly only ever see the "slowness in cut/paste" subset
of screen refresh problems anyhow.

I vaguely feel as though a couple people posted in the Entourage group that
things seemed snappier under Tiger, but I can't recall if they were also
referring to Word (my vague unreliable memory says at least one may have
been), and those posts are outweighed by the people posting problems under
Tiger. So many people complained of different aspects of slowness, I can't
imagine it *not* being publicized if Tiger had improved it.

Google refuses to turn it up, but at some point it was also noted that the
MacBU changed the priorities so that memory goes to updating the visible
mouse location instead of the text, which created some of the
slowness--certainly the slow on cut/paste, not sure if that was also linked
to the scrolling slowness.

If I remember, I'll see if I can test at my campus store sometime...though
that method wouldn't prove a fix, only confirm a non-fix.

Daiya

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi John,

Thanks, I think, for that answer.

I take it that you fall into the category of persons who know but can't
tell, so I won't press you to divulge anything you're not supposed to.

However, if a solution to the well-documented Word 2004 performance problems
is at hand, and the hand delivering the solution isn't Apple's (here I'm
making a large but probably reasonable assumption) does it not make sense to
conclude that the problem was not an Apple problem in the first place?

Yours,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

In computing, lots of things can be true at the same time.

It could also "make sense" that a problem created by one piece of software
may be able to be alleviated by making changes in another piece of software
to work around the original problem.

It could even be true that a poor design in one part of a piece of software
might enable a problem to be created by another part of that software, but
that by changing the way a different piece of software works, it could avoid
triggering the problem for most activities of most users of that third piece
of software, at the expense of a negligible performance degradation for a
small group of its users.

All wild speculation, I am sure you understand

Cheers

Hi John,

Thanks, I think, for that answer.

I take it that you fall into the category of persons who know but can't
tell, so I won't press you to divulge anything you're not supposed to.

However, if a solution to the well-documented Word 2004 performance problems
is at hand, and the hand delivering the solution isn't Apple's (here I'm
making a large but probably reasonable assumption) does it not make sense to
conclude that the problem was not an Apple problem in the first place?

Yours,

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Parallel Prose]

Thanks John.

I appreciate the wildly speculative response. But it does leave one
unanswered question:

when will we get the update :*)

Yours, in anticipation,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Parallel Prose]

Well if we read between the lines and make a couple of, quite reasonable,
assumptions I think it's clear that what were waiting on here is an Office
2004 for OS X update from Microsoft that will fix the performance problem.

For a start, Apple just released a massive update to OS X and its
inconceivable, to me, that they would not have addressed this problem if
they believed that it fell within their bailiwick. Microsoft Office is the
most popular productivity package on the planet and it does nothing but hurt
Apple to have Word's performance be so dismal on OS X.

And I am inferring from your comment

"I think there's better news to come, but as usual, those who know can't
tell us, and those who tell us, don't know "

that you know something about future happenings with regard to Office. If
that's not the case then perhaps you shouldn't be so casual with your
remarks.

I'm not trying to be a smartass here. I'm just trying to find a way out of
this crippling Word performance morass that no one seems to want to own up
to but impacts me on a daily basis. Like you, I'm an independent writer and
slow performance impacts my productivity and costs me money. I was hoping a
move to Tiger might help but it seems like Microsoft is the more likely
source for the solution.

Yours,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I think it's clear that what were waiting on here is an Office
2004 for OS X update from Microsoft that will fix the performance problem.

Apple to have Word's performance be so dismal on OS X.

this crippling Word performance morass that no one seems to want to own up
to but impacts me on a daily basis.

It's not that no one wants to own up to it. It's just that the performance
problems that I see (Word 2004 11.1.1, OS 10.3.9, 1.5ghz g4 pb, 2 GB RAM,
and before I had 512MB RAM, but even then) are not what I would call
"crippling" "miserable" or "dismal". They are occasionally slightly
annoying. I get similar slight annoyances in Safari, Dreamweaver, and
FileMaker Pro. It's possible, though I do use Word every day all day, that I
am not pushing it very hard. I may retract such statements this summer when
I get back to working with my 400-page files regularly. However, other
renditions of this thread have made it clear that some people see worse
problems than others.

So the performance problems do not affect everyone to the same extent, which
makes it very hard to track down the cause, and therefore very difficult to
design a fix. One of the Word testers has posted here several times asking
for more information on slowness complaints, so the MacBU is certainly aware
and investigating the issue. If you would like to post your system
information and some specific data about slowness, that might help--e.g.,
how long are the problematic docs, how many tracked changes are we talking,
how many seconds delay on scrolling, how are you scrolling, what view are
you using, etc. Those are the type of questions that Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]
has asked when people report slowness. Feel free to read his previous
posts.

There is another update coming, "this year."
http://blogs.msdn.com/decheung/archive/2005/05/17/418469.aspx

Whether it will fix any performance issues, who knows?

DM

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi Daiya,

I don't think this issue is related to the size of a document.

An email from John this morning, and your post from Friday, got me thinking
and I decided to do some experimenting. It didn't make sense to me that
neither of you were able to see the problem that so many other people have
reported.

I've recently been editing a 90 page document. I have track changes switched
on but other functionality, like spelling and grammar checking, switched
off. I'm viewing the markup as I go - Final Showing Markup - in page layout
view.

As I've been getting further into the document, piling up the edits, Word
has been taking longer and longer to redraw the screen whenever I change
text, cut and paste, or navigate around the document with either keyboard
shortcuts or the mouse. I'm about half way through the document and there
are a significant number of changes being tracked.

As is my habit, I'm working in page layout view. After trying one or two
things I switched to normal view and noticed that the performance drag went
away immediately. I made some revisions and the performance improvement
seemed to be maintained.

I went back to page layout and switched off "use balloons to display
changes" in the track changes preferences panel - this gives the same markup
display as in normal mode. This also improved the performance. I made some
more revisions with no noticeable degrading of performance.

I then re-enabled the balloons - still in page layout view - and performance
is OK but then gradually degrades as I make revisions.

So perhaps the screen redraw performance problem is related to those track
changes balloons.

I personally prefer the way the markup looks with the balloons, but if it
makes the program useable I can live with the inconvenience of not using
them until there's a fix for the problem.

I didn't make that many edits to the document during any of these tests, so
there is still a chance that the performance could degrade again as
revisions mount up. We shall see.

All the best,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004 - Word 11.1 (040910)

http://www.parallelprose.com

I think it's clear that what were waiting on here is an Office
2004 for OS X update from Microsoft that will fix the performance problem.

Apple to have Word's performance be so dismal on OS X.

this crippling Word performance morass that no one seems to want to own up
to but impacts me on a daily basis.

It's not that no one wants to own up to it. It's just that the performance
problems that I see (Word 2004 11.1.1, OS 10.3.9, 1.5ghz g4 pb, 2 GB RAM,
and before I had 512MB RAM, but even then) are not what I would call
"crippling" "miserable" or "dismal". They are occasionally slightly
annoying. I get similar slight annoyances in Safari, Dreamweaver, and
FileMaker Pro. It's possible, though I do use Word every day all day, that I
am not pushing it very hard. I may retract such statements this summer when
I get back to working with my 400-page files regularly. However, other
renditions of this thread have made it clear that some people see worse
problems than others.

So the performance problems do not affect everyone to the same extent, which
makes it very hard to track down the cause, and therefore very difficult to
design a fix. One of the Word testers has posted here several times asking
for more information on slowness complaints, so the MacBU is certainly aware
and investigating the issue. If you would like to post your system
information and some specific data about slowness, that might help--e.g.,
how long are the problematic docs, how many tracked changes are we talking,
how many seconds delay on scrolling, how are you scrolling, what view are
you using, etc. Those are the type of questions that Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]
has asked when people report slowness. Feel free to read his previous
posts.

There is another update coming, "this year."
http://blogs.msdn.com/decheung/archive/2005/05/17/418469.aspx

Whether it will fix any performance issues, who knows?

DM

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

I just suggested to Nigel that he may like to round-trip the document to
HTML to clean it up, and to accept the changes and use Compare Documents at
the completion of editing instead.

Tracked changes will indeed slow a document down a lot of you need to make a
large number of detailed revisions.

Hi Daiya,

I don't think this issue is related to the size of a document.

An email from John this morning, and your post from Friday, got me thinking
and I decided to do some experimenting. It didn't make sense to me that
neither of you were able to see the problem that so many other people have
reported.

I've recently been editing a 90 page document. I have track changes switched
on but other functionality, like spelling and grammar checking, switched
off. I'm viewing the markup as I go - Final Showing Markup - in page layout
view.

As I've been getting further into the document, piling up the edits, Word
has been taking longer and longer to redraw the screen whenever I change
text, cut and paste, or navigate around the document with either keyboard
shortcuts or the mouse. I'm about half way through the document and there
are a significant number of changes being tracked.

As is my habit, I'm working in page layout view. After trying one or two
things I switched to normal view and noticed that the performance drag went
away immediately. I made some revisions and the performance improvement
seemed to be maintained.

I went back to page layout and switched off "use balloons to display
changes" in the track changes preferences panel - this gives the same markup
display as in normal mode. This also improved the performance. I made some
more revisions with no noticeable degrading of performance.

I then re-enabled the balloons - still in page layout view - and performance
is OK but then gradually degrades as I make revisions.

So perhaps the screen redraw performance problem is related to those track
changes balloons.

I personally prefer the way the markup looks with the balloons, but if it
makes the program useable I can live with the inconvenience of not using
them until there's a fix for the problem.

I didn't make that many edits to the document during any of these tests, so
there is still a chance that the performance could degrade again as
revisions mount up. We shall see.

All the best,

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Nigel,

Hmm. I was going to say I would expect degradation with 90pps of track
changes balloons, but I did do 55 the other day, in page layout view with
balloons, and I don't recall being unhappy. Probably only a few edits per
page, though. Can't remember if that was before or after my memory
upgrade--I think after.

In general, Word 2004 has screen redraw problems. Anything that requires
more complicated and more frequent screen refresh is going to take a toll on
performance. Two of those things are certainly Page Layout View and Track
Changes balloons, especially the balloons. Normal View is designed to be
faster, especially by minimizing the need to redraw the screen. So
everything you are seeing fits with the known issues/information. Hard to
tell--"longer" is awfully vague--whether your problem is excessive.

I believe slowness in Page Layout view is certainly related to the length of
the document, because Word has to constantly repaginate and sort out where
the page breaks will be, I think, so it is working much harder.

I would say you are underpowered with 512MB RAM, though. Here's an article
on memory.
http://www.themacobserver.com/columns/rantsandraves/2004/20040611.shtml
I was using the Memory Stick utility mentioned in it--it dings to tell you
the memory is under stress. With 512MB of RAM, running usually Word,
Safari, and Entourage, it was dinging *constantly*.

Daiya

 

[dave.mahoney]

Hello,

I am running Tiger with Office 2004 11.1.1. I have font conflicts when
launching Word. I am using FontBook 2. I can not get past the font
conflict - Word says these fonts are corrupt. I don't believe this is
true because these same fonts perform well with all other apps except
Word. Any advice?

Thanks, Dave

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hey Nigel,

Thanks for posting in detail what specific performance problems you're
running into. Unfortunately as you can probably tell, the more complex and
"heavier" you document gets the slower it will get.

However, we are listening to users comments when making decision regarding a
future release of Word.

Specifically regarding Track Changes, if you're in Page Layout View and
using the Bubbles, I would recommend you keep the "Reviewing Pane" off,
since that's just yet more screen content that Word has to constantly
update.

Regarding performance improvements for Tiger, MacOffice 2004 was completed a
full 11 months before the release of Tiger by Apple. So any gains in
performance to MacOffice 2004 from a change of OS would result indirectly
from Apple's improvements on their technology.

With Track Changes, you will most likely not see a massivly substantial
performance improvement with these complex documents if you move to Tiger.
If only software was that easy.

But as I mentioned, we are reading your and others comments, and taking them
into consideration for future releases.

--
Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi Daiya,

I don't think this issue is related to the size of a document.

An email from John this morning, and your post from Friday, got me
thinking
and I decided to do some experimenting. It didn't make sense to me that
neither of you were able to see the problem that so many other people have
reported.

I've recently been editing a 90 page document. I have track changes
switched
on but other functionality, like spelling and grammar checking, switched
off. I'm viewing the markup as I go - Final Showing Markup - in page
layout
view.

As I've been getting further into the document, piling up the edits, Word
has been taking longer and longer to redraw the screen whenever I change
text, cut and paste, or navigate around the document with either keyboard
shortcuts or the mouse. I'm about half way through the document and there
are a significant number of changes being tracked.

As is my habit, I'm working in page layout view. After trying one or two
things I switched to normal view and noticed that the performance drag
went
away immediately. I made some revisions and the performance improvement
seemed to be maintained.

I went back to page layout and switched off "use balloons to display
changes" in the track changes preferences panel - this gives the same
markup
display as in normal mode. This also improved the performance. I made some
more revisions with no noticeable degrading of performance.

I then re-enabled the balloons - still in page layout view - and
performance
is OK but then gradually degrades as I make revisions.

So perhaps the screen redraw performance problem is related to those track
changes balloons.

I personally prefer the way the markup looks with the balloons, but if it
makes the program useable I can live with the inconvenience of not using
them until there's a fix for the problem.

I didn't make that many edits to the document during any of these tests,
so
there is still a chance that the performance could degrade again as
revisions mount up. We shall see.

All the best,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004 - Word 11.1 (040910)

http://www.parallelprose.com

I think it's clear that what were waiting on here is an Office
2004 for OS X update from Microsoft that will fix the performance
problem.

Apple to have Word's performance be so dismal on OS X.

this crippling Word performance morass that no one seems to want to own
up
to but impacts me on a daily basis.

It's not that no one wants to own up to it. It's just that the
performance
problems that I see (Word 2004 11.1.1, OS 10.3.9, 1.5ghz g4 pb, 2 GB RAM,
and before I had 512MB RAM, but even then) are not what I would call
"crippling" "miserable" or "dismal". They are occasionally slightly
annoying. I get similar slight annoyances in Safari, Dreamweaver, and
FileMaker Pro. It's possible, though I do use Word every day all day,
that I
am not pushing it very hard. I may retract such statements this summer
when
I get back to working with my 400-page files regularly. However, other
renditions of this thread have made it clear that some people see worse
problems than others.

So the performance problems do not affect everyone to the same extent,
which
makes it very hard to track down the cause, and therefore very difficult
to
design a fix. One of the Word testers has posted here several times
asking
for more information on slowness complaints, so the MacBU is certainly
aware
and investigating the issue. If you would like to post your system
information and some specific data about slowness, that might help--e.g.,
how long are the problematic docs, how many tracked changes are we
talking,
how many seconds delay on scrolling, how are you scrolling, what view are
you using, etc. Those are the type of questions that Jeffrey Weston
[MSFT]
has asked when people report slowness. Feel free to read his previous
posts.

There is another update coming, "this year."
http://blogs.msdn.com/decheung/archive/2005/05/17/418469.aspx

Whether it will fix any performance issues, who knows?

DM

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi Daiya,

The link you posted didn't work but I found the article here
http://www.macobserver.com/columns/rantsandraves/2004/20040611.shtml

I'm going to give Matt's program a try. I know I could use more memory on my
Mac mini, but I have a G5 iMac with 1GB of RAM and that also bogs down in
the Word files. So I don't know that a memory boost is going to do very
much.

As I just mentioned in responding to Jeffrey's post, the frustrating thing
is that running Word on my old 933MHz Transmeta powered laptop with Windows
XP leaves the Mac in the dust. But only when running Word. For every other
program I've tried, the Mac responds faster - purely subjective measurements
of course.

Anyway, I hope the MacBU guys figure out how to make the Mac and Windows
performance more comparable. Until then I'll just be using Word with most of
it's functionality disabled.

All the best,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi John,

I did the round-trip to HTML. I can see how that would be very useful for
some of my other projects but, for this one, the document developed too many
weird formatting problems to be useable - footnotes were shunted so far left
that I couldn't get them back, and most of the tables developed some
strangeness. I suspect formatting anomalies in the original document might
be the cause.

For now, with this project, I'm going to continue to use page layout with
track changes balloons switched off.

All the best,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

I just suggested to Nigel that he may like to round-trip the document to
HTML to clean it up, and to accept the changes and use Compare Documents at
the completion of editing instead.

Tracked changes will indeed slow a document down a lot of you need to make a
large number of detailed revisions.

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Nigel,

You might want to try the more traditional method of cleaning up a document;
it tends to cause fewer formatting alterations. Copy all but the last
paragraph mark of the document and copy into a blank new document. More
here: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice; better yet, use another
browser.)


--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Parallel Prose]

Hi Beth,

Thanks for the suggestion. I followed the link and read the procedures.
Unfortunately the document I have been working on has become so unwieldy
that I'm afraid to attempt to do too much to it. I don't want to risk losing
changes that I've already made (my client just came back with a boat load of
additional material that I have to incorporate into the doc!!)

In the future I think I might try the process you suggested before I begin
editing. At least then I could be sure to have a relatively clean document
before making any changes.

All the best,

--
Nigel

Mac OS 10.3.9 ­ 1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512 MB SDRAM
Microsoft Office 2004

http://www.parallelprose.com

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Nigel,

That's easy. Make a duplicate of the document and try the procedure on the
copy!

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>