Office 2008 Excel Word Autosave problems

[JenBell]

Hello People,

I recently moved over to Mac via Macbook Pro 17". I initially ran
VMware Windows 7 and Office 2007 and all is well. I saw a friend
running Office 2008 and bought a copy to give it a go. I really really
like the Excel and Word Mac versions.

My problem is the autosave feature. I have set this to 3 mins for word
and excel. Every 3 mins the beach ball appears for around 10-20
seconds...like clockwork. I enter a lot of data very quickly so
anything over 3 mins is not an option. My HDD is 500GB 7200RPM.

In VMware Win7 I have the same config and have zero problems.

I am running update 12.2...the latest all up-to-date version.

Is Mac Office simply that slow or is there a fix to this?

Thanks,

JenBell

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi JenBell;

Please don't take this the wrong way ‹ I just want to make sure you aren't
under any wrong impression ‹ but there is no "autosave" in either version of
Word or Excel. The feature is Save AutoRecover Data which only temporarily
stores changes made since the last 'manual' save you execute. Having it set
to replace the temporary file every 3 minutes is a killer in anyone's
workflow ... Especially if you are at all conscientious about saving your
work periodically in the first place.

If you aren't saving (Command+S) as you go, more frequent & larger temp
files are being written which would account for the delay. I don't know how
the tech aspect compares PC/Mac, but entrusting large amounts of your work
to AutoRecover for an extended period of time is risky business on either
platform. If you've never had a problem with it you should consider yourself
a very fortunate individual

I would expect more commentary on the matter, but IMHO that setting is best
left at 10 minutes or higher. In that way it will not interrupt at all
unless you go for that period of time without saving.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[JenBell]

Hello Cyber,

Thank u for the reply. I understand your viewpoint...in the Mac world.
Sorry but I have had the AutoRecovery (I call it AutoSave) set to 3
mins since Office 2000. Never had any problems. Why should the Mac? My
hardware has only got better during that time as well. As I
mentioned...a virtualised Windows 7 with Norton 2010 with 2GB or
virtual RAM totally kills office (excel, word and visio all set to 3
mins with multiple programm instances open (not windows I open most
things is separate instances) and then some. I only get the circle
waiting thing in win7 when I've reached 20 instanced in total...which
is fine.

In MacOffice I am only opening one file, one instance and
beachball...sry...that is just a bad performance in my eyes (and this
is a native app). Guess I'll just have to give 2008 a miss for now.

I've got my desktop PC running Office 2007 (3Ghz quad, 4GB RAM, 150GB
Raptor main HDD and Sonnet 7TB RAID array external drive) set to 2
mins and hardly ever get the beachball...not even my ancient work
laptop (some single core HP laptop) causes me any problems.

As u can tell...not happy with this Office program...at all -_-

JenBell (Not.A.HappyBunny)

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Jennifer:

Yeah, well performance in Office 2008 is not a problem on my dual-quad
workstation either On my MacBook, some compromises are necessary:
setting the AutoRecover a lot higher is one of them

Sorry, but laptops are intentionally built with slow hard disks, because
slow disks are more rugged and use a lot less battery than fast ones. If
you want to give that laptop a new lease on life, throw out the hard disk
and replace it with a Solid State Drive. Don't buy a "cheap" one, get the
expensive one, they have double the "write" speed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000.html

I've always found MacSales to be the best source of Mac bits. They won't be
quite the cheapest (although much cheaper than Apple) but you can be sure
that they have tested a sample of each product in a Mac before they offer it
for sale, which is good to know.

They're doing a nice line in Crucial SSDs currently:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/

The other thing you can do is make sure the lappy is full of memory: as much
as it will hold. When you are working intensively with complex
applications, nothing beats lotsa memory. 8 GB is a nice round number

Again: MacSales....

Now check your Energy Saving preference to ensure that you do NOT have "put
the hard disks to sleep when possible" checked. This may be the source of
your bother: if you are waiting for the hard disk to spin up for each save,
things will get a little beach-bally.

Unchecking that setting will murder your battery life: which is important to
you? You takes yer choices...

Finally, check in Excel>Preferences>Compatibility to ensure that your Save
format is set to .xlsx. If it isn't, or if you are working on a file in the
old binary format, two things are happening to slow you down: one is that
you are waiting for Excel to convert the file out of its native format
before it can save the AutoRecover, and that takes time. The other is that
the file when it does save it will be four times the size, and thus take
four times as long to write to disk.

All that said, "yeah", Office 2008 is a bit of a slug. The development team
badly wanted to improve performance, but they simply ran out of time before
the product was due to be released. Expect Office 2010 to not only restore
full functionality, but also to be a lot quicker.

Hope this helps

Hello Cyber,

Thank u for the reply. I understand your viewpoint...in the Mac world.
Sorry but I have had the AutoRecovery (I call it AutoSave) set to 3
mins since Office 2000. Never had any problems. Why should the Mac? My
hardware has only got better during that time as well. As I
mentioned...a virtualised Windows 7 with Norton 2010 with 2GB or
virtual RAM totally kills office (excel, word and visio all set to 3
mins with multiple programm instances open (not windows I open most
things is separate instances) and then some. I only get the circle
waiting thing in win7 when I've reached 20 instanced in total...which
is fine.

In MacOffice I am only opening one file, one instance and
beachball...sry...that is just a bad performance in my eyes (and this
is a native app). Guess I'll just have to give 2008 a miss for now.

I've got my desktop PC running Office 2007 (3Ghz quad, 4GB RAM, 150GB
Raptor main HDD and Sonnet 7TB RAID array external drive) set to 2
mins and hardly ever get the beachball...not even my ancient work
laptop (some single core HP laptop) causes me any problems.

As u can tell...not happy with this Office program...at all -_-

JenBell (Not.A.HappyBunny)

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[JenBell]

Hi John,

Thank u for the response. Right now I think 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM
HDD is enough. I see the speed I get in VMware...and still cant
believe that Office 2008 is so slow in saving. Good point about the
new format, some of my files are indeed in the old format.

The thing is that like most people...sometimes you get into your
'zone' and simply work away for few hours (without saving) and it
hurts when you lose that work...or any of it. Mind you Office 2008
does have one thing I like or admire...at least it has avoided the
excel file corruption thing that I have been experiencing for the last
few months. Office 2007 is corrupting my files and 2008 does not play
nice with autorecover option set to anything other a time range for
[insert 'w'ord;-]'s.

(End of rant...er...)

I have seriously looked at the 8GB RAM upgrade but I'll hold off until
the prices drop by at least another £100...simply too expensive right
now to justify the nominal performance I increase I'll get.
SSD...hmmm...nice but the batter life is fine and the performance is
fine in everythng bar o2008. Take office 2008 out and the laptop
performance is great at anything I throw at it. Counting down the days
until VMware fusion 3 comes out and I go all aero on win7...life will
have new meaning...or my dowz life will at least.

Note to people...might be using a Mac but Win7's auto window size
thing when u drag a window to edge is like one killer feature I simply
cant live without right now and find the new taskbar thing amazing and
the whole highlight different files to preview and then in turn see
through is like wow (have alot of windows open all the time when
working). Now...Apple...some Windows window-resize-like magic please^_^

 

[JenBell]

Cyber Taz...I have seen the light;-) OK...so after getting over
whatever mental mindblock I had I decided to switch over to MO2008
properly instead of half and half. I increased the autosave timer to 8
mins and same for word...and now I am all Office 2008. I am risking
more data loss via the 8mins but damn....I totally really really
really like the office 2008 floating menu system and generally its
been pretty solid stability wise. No crashes yet but when I am in the
heat of things and actually working away I still get the pauses but
they are not so often...obviously this is down to the 8mins instead of
a few mins. I am going to stick to 2008 for now until MS get around to
2010...with VB this time (idiots for leaving it out...excel no vb is
like....something without something it needs...er...)

Now...MS when do I get my Mac Visio 20xx? I mean drawing visio's with
gestures would be like the best thing in my working life.

At an end this message is if enough so it was^_^"

JenBell

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Jen:

The VBA issue was one of those four-into-two-won't-fit decisions. Nobody
"wanted" to do it, but they simply didn't have enough developers, and they
didn't have time to train any, so VBA had to go.

When it comes back, chances are it will be much improved because now they
have had time to sit down and code it "right".

Interesting commend about Visio I have always maintained that Visio is
very very good at what it does, but "graphics" is not what it does It's
the bee's knees for creating "Office" graphics, but I suspect there's no
chance we'll see it, because on the Mac it would get totally creamed by
Adobe's CS4.

On the other hand, if you investigate the "SmartArt" bits in Office 2008,
that *is* bits of Visio, beginning to appear. What you are looking at there
is the "Escher Graphics Engine", and there's a lot more to come from that.

Cheers

Cyber Taz...I have seen the light;-) OK...so after getting over
whatever mental mindblock I had I decided to switch over to MO2008
properly instead of half and half. I increased the autosave timer to 8
mins and same for word...and now I am all Office 2008. I am risking
more data loss via the 8mins but damn....I totally really really
really like the office 2008 floating menu system and generally its
been pretty solid stability wise. No crashes yet but when I am in the
heat of things and actually working away I still get the pauses but
they are not so often...obviously this is down to the 8mins instead of
a few mins. I am going to stick to 2008 for now until MS get around to
2010...with VB this time (idiots for leaving it out...excel no vb is
like....something without something it needs...er...)

Now...MS when do I get my Mac Visio 20xx? I mean drawing visio's with
gestures would be like the best thing in my working life.

At an end this message is if enough so it was^_^"

JenBell

--

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi JenBell;

Glad things are looking up Now if I could just get you to key Command+S
once every *7 mins 59 secs* you might never again see a "pause"... But ‹ as
it's often been said ‹ Rome wasn't built in a day ;-)

As for Visio on the Mac, as John suggested I'd not hold my breath. I'm not
sure what your specific need might encompass, but you might be interested in
taking a look a OmniGraffle ‹ it has been a Mac staple for years:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac