Office 2008 starts very slow

[DwightSchultz]

Hi,

I just installed a fresh copy of Office 2008 and I'm experiencing very slow startup times for all office 2008 applications across the board. And I'm not talking just slow, I'm talking very slow: about 5 tot 10 minutes for Entourage and Word.

During startup my system resources are through the roof. The activity manager reports 90% resources taken up by Entourage at boot time.

I'm running it on a Leopard Mac Book Pro with a 2.4 Ghz intel chip and 4GB of ram. With those specs nothing should run this slow...

When it does finally start (no errors, no problems reported) it runs smooth without a problem.

Can anyone please help? I've been going insane trying to solve this.

Many thanks.

Dwight

 

[Bates]

Hi,
I just installed a fresh copy of Office 2008 and I'm experiencing very slow startup times for all office 2008 applications across the board. And I'm not talking just slow, I'm talking very slow: about 5 tot 10 minutes for Entourage and Word.
During startup my system resources are through the roof. The activity manager reports 90% resources taken up by Entourage at boot time.
I'm running it on a Leopard Mac Book Pro with a 2.4 Ghz intel chip and 4GB of ram. With those specs nothing should run this slow...
When it does finally start (no errors, no problems reported) it runs smooth without a problem.
Can anyone please help? I've been going insane trying to solve this.
Many thanks.
Dwight

Hmmmm, that IS slow. It definitely starts slower than 2004 (odd being
that it is Intel "optimised") but not that slow.

I wonder though, your problem sounds very similar to a problem I am
having. I too have a MBP (17") with the 2.4GHz SR processor and 4GB
RAM - basically sounds like what you have. Certain apps will cause
the system resources to max out - both processors, and almost all my
RAM. It is not uncommon for my system to be sitting idol with one or
two apps open and 3.8GB or RAM being used. I've read reports of some
"known" problems with the OSX kernel with some apps causing huge
amounts of RAM to be wired. Not sure if it is related to your
problem. Just a question, are you running VMware or Parallels in the
background when you are trying to load the office apps?

Neil

 

[DwightSchultz]

Thanks for your reply Bates. No, I'm not running Parelles and Vmware in the background (though both are installed). I try to run as little processes as possible during startup to make sure the program has sufficient resources. So far without any result though...

 

[Allan]

I am seeing the same thing on a 2.66GHz MacPro, 6GB RAM. Not as slow as the reader above but I was expecting a much faster start-up considering this 2008 is optimised for Intel chips.

Makes me wonder whether to go back to 2004 which even under Rosetta started up more quickly.

 

[Bates]

Thanks for your reply Bates. No, I'm not running Parelles and Vmware in the background (though both are installed). I try to run as little processes as possible during startup to make sure the program has sufficient resources. So far without any result though...

Ah...it was just a thought. I've not identified the cause of my
problems yet but was starting to think that was part of it (only part
though).

Silly question, did you try doing a reinstall of Office?

Do you still have Office 2004 installed? Did it slow down too (Office
2004 for me is fine actually even with 2008 on as well).

Frustrating I'm sure.

Bates....

 

[DwightSchultz]

Nope, I didn't have 2004 installed or even every used it. I did not try to reinstall 2008, might give it a shot later.

Right now I'm seeing if it might have to do something with my fonts. I'm running quite a lot of fonts on my system and from experience I know this bogs down programs every once and a while.

Keep you posted on this.

have you tried a reinstall?

 

[ccstephe]

I also have this problem with Office 2008. In fact, the start up is slower than the Office X I was using previously. A little better on my Intel MacBook but agonizingly slow on a Powerbook G4 and a Dual 2.5 Ghz G5 PowerPC. Excel is faster than Word but still unacceptable. I have cleaned up my fonts folder and removed all remnants of Office X. Office 2008 is probably the slowest app I having in launching with the possible exception of Photoshop. All of the iWork apps are considerably faster in opening. The good news that once the apps open they work great,.

 

[DwightSchultz]

@ccstephe: Sounds exactly to what I'm experiencing. When they finally started they work at brilliant speed.

Anyone have any suggestions how http://www.officeformac.com/macimages/btn_publish.gifto help us out? Is anyone at Microsoft reading this forum? Hellooooo?

 

[Chuck2008]

I am having serious speed problems with my G5 Dual 1.8Gz also. One 9MB ppt
tile took 5 minutes to open and then response much slower than 2004 ppt.
Excel is also a problem, files open more slowly but in less than a minute.
However the copy/paste operation hangs up for about 20 seconds. A save takes
5-10 seconds. Most other functions work ok. Entourage is ok, but also
slower. Havent used Word at all yet. This is a big concern. Should we
remove 2008 and go back to 2004?

Chuck

 

[Guest]

On my G4 Dual (running Safari, Mail, Stickies, Real in the background and having cleared previous versions of Word and Office):

While Word and PowerPoint opened slower than expected, what troubles me more is how slowly they are running. Word is dragging but PowerPoint is positively glacial. The pizza spins for 10 seconds when I hit Return.

I look forward to eventual resolution.

Tim

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

For slow start ups, try this and see if it helps: With all office
applications closed, go to your Microsoft Office 2008\Office\Shared
Applications\Proofing Tools folder, and delete (or copy out to some other
place) tools for any language you do not (will not) use.

 

[ccstephe]

Thanks for the response Bob. I only have English files in that folder. Like one of the other readers it takes about 23 seconds for word to open..Excel and Power pPoint are faster but still slow. I was at an Apple store yesterday and tried Word on an iMac and it had the same problem...the store employee was surpised and even restarted the computer to see if that made a difference. This appears to be a universal problem. Any other ideas?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Thanks for the response Bob. I only have English files in that folder.
Like one of the other readers it takes about 23 seconds for word to
open..Excel and Power pPoint are faster but still slow. I was at an Apple
store yesterday and tried Word on an iMac and it had the same problem...the
store employee was surpised and even restarted the computer to see if that
made a difference. This appears to be a universal problem. Any other ideas?

Well, it's certainly not universal, since Word starts up in 4-5 seconds
for me on my MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM). So something about your
setup is causing the problem (not a criticsm, btw).

Are you using an extraordinary number of fonts? Have you changed any of
your template or other paths in Preferences/File Locations? Are you
using the default Normal.dotm template? Is there anything in your
startup folder? Do you get the same lack of performance if you have
other apps (including antivirus) apps running?

 

[ccstephe]

Thanks for the response JE. As I mentioned earlier, I have this installed of three different computers and tried one in the Apple Store and have seen this problem on all of them. This includes 2 Intel machines (MacBook & iMac) and 2 Power PC's (G4 Powerbook & Dual G5). I have 200 fonts on one machine, 100 on another, and 60 on a third. I have used the Font Book to remove any corrupted fonts and duplicates. These are less fonts than I was using with Office X. I am using the default Normal.dotm template and have not any paths in the Preferences folder, no antivirus running, and all other app's open immediately with the exception of Photoshop which has always taken a while to open which is understandable. Startup only has iCal in it. Those are all good suggestions JE but don't work in my case. I'm thinking of reinstalling to see if that does anything....

 

[DwightSchultz]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your reply. I tried that but unfortunately it didn't do the trick. The startup is still around 5 minutes for both Word and Entourage. Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[ccstephe]

Well, I deinstalled Office, made sure that there were no old Microsoft files anywhere on my system and then reinstalled. Excel is now consistently starting in 4 seconds compared to 2 seconds with Apple's iWork Numbers software. Word improved to 10 seconds for a while but after a few more starts now runs between 10 and 23 seconds. Better than what Dwight is experiencing but still not acceptable. I have tried disabling most of my fonts and still no improvement. Apple's iWork pages software opens in 2 seconds. Even photoshop beats 23 seconds...any additional suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your reply. I tried that but unfortunately it didn't do the trick.
The startup is still around 5 minutes for both Word and Entourage. Do you
have any other suggestions?

Thanks!

No, unfortunately I don¹t. On my 867Mhz G4, word takes 17 seconds to launch
with all the original fonts and proofing tools. So, there obviously is a
configuration difference, but I don¹t know what it might be, or what to try
next.

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hi Dwight,



Sorry you're having this problem.



Just a quick sanity check: Did restarting your computer improve the performance at all?



Also, it would be great if you could give me the following information:

* Does Excel and Powerpoint also take approximately the same time (5-min) to start up?

* What does the splash screen say under the "Product ID" line, during the long pause to start up? Usually it flashes lines such as "configuring Office components" or "Optimizing Font Menu..."



Thanks


--
Jeffrey Weston
Word for Mac Tester
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft



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

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your reply. I tried that but unfortunately it didn't do the trick. The startup is still around 5 minutes for both Word and Entourage. Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[noibs]

I agree that Office 2008 starts very slow for an Intel native set of apps. For me that means starting up either Excel or Word FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE LAST BOOT of Mac OSX. Once any Office app is launched, subsequent launches of the same or a different Office app are much, much quicker, probably due to various hardware and software caching, as well as use of common components.

So...if you're still interested in this issue, reboot your Mac and then launch Word or Excel and report the launch time along with your hardware specs and Mac OSX version. Only launch one of these apps and report that time. If you want to do another app, then first reboot.

On my 2.16ghz MacBook w/2GB of RAM running 10.4.11, the first Excel launch takes a horrible 31 seconds. In my opinion, that's absurdly slow as compared to all of my Universal apps. Frankly, before I purchased Office 2008 I was expecting 6 or 7 seconds. Launching any Office 2004 component under Rosetta didn't take 31 seconds.

Just for the record, my disk directory has been optimized using Disk Warrior; I have no permissions problems and I even forced a complete prebinding just to see if that was causing the slow launches.

 

[noibs]

This is a followup to my previous message.

After a warm boot, Word takes 26 seconds to launch. However, after that Excel only takes 10 seconds to launch--as compared to the 31 seconds it takes if it's the first Office app to launch after a boot.

Likewise, If I've already launched Excel, then Word only takes 10 seconds instead of 26 seconds.