Office 2008 starts very slow

[DwightSchultz]

@Jeffery: thanks for your reply. I did try a reboot, serveral times but without luck. I also did a fresh install, no luck.

All Office 2008 apps are slow on my Mac: Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage.

I looked at the splash screen today of both Word, Powerpoint and Entourage but none give me any feedback whatsoever. *sigh*

There is one thing I found strange. RIf I rightclick the icon in the talkbar of any MSFT application I start I get the 'force quit' option which suggests it hangs during startup. That's what it feels like as wel. I launch the app, I hangs for 5 minutes, refinds itself and then goes to work like nothing happend...

Are there any tools that I can use to find out what it's doing in the background?

 

[ccstephe]

I have gotten my Excel launches down to 3-4 seconds consistently and have gotten word down to 6 to 10 seconds consistently. I did this by going to my user library...caches folder....Microsoft Office folder...OP Cache folder...file named thumb_cache.xml. I removed that file and then restarted the applications. The file has been replaced so I'm assuming trashing that file is OK. (Saved it just in case). This has resulted in what appears faster start up times...we'll see if it lasts. Here I am complaining about seconds and poor Dwight is dealing with minutes!

 

[mlondon]

Add my name to the list of glacial startup times in Word and Excel. Havent measure them, but they are much slower than Office 2004 and the both applications seem slow on my MacBookPro 2.4 Ghz with 4GB of RAM.

Trashing the "thumb_cache.xml" file was slightly helpful, but it will probably slow down again.

Is it just me, or does anyone else smell some "Vista-ness" around here? (ie: Maybe Office 2004 is the lesser of two evils?)

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hi Dwight,

Could you describe you environment a little more. Such as if you're conntected to a network. Are you User files (Documents, Pictures, etc...) located on a network share or on your local computer.
Does this issue occur when you have quit all other applications?
Do you have any software installed that adds items to the contextual menu (Control-click), menubars, etc... that affects all applications?
Did you have a previous version Office installed on yoru computer before you installed Office 2008? If so, what?

One thing you can try is to:
1. Quit all Office Apps
2. In the Finder, Navigate to: <Hard Disk>/Users/<UserName>/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/
3. Rename the folder called "Office 2008" to anything else like "Office 2008_old"
4. Boot Word
5. Quit Word
6. Boot Word again

Let me know, if the problem still persists.

--
Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

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

@Jeffery: thanks for your reply. I did try a reboot, serveral times but without luck. I also did a fresh install, no luck.

All Office 2008 apps are slow on my Mac: Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage.

I looked at the splash screen today of both Word, Powerpoint and Entourage but none give me any feedback whatsoever. *sigh*

There is one thing I found strange. RIf I rightclick the icon in the talkbar of any MSFT application I start I get the 'force quit' option which suggests it hangs during startup. That's what it feels like as wel. I launch the app, I hangs for 5 minutes, refinds itself and then goes to work like nothing happend...

Are there any tools that I can use to find out what it's doing in the background?

 

[John McGhie]

Yep. The first launch after a cold boot re-builds the font caches. That
takes ((number of fonts) x n) seconds A 30 to 60-second launch of the
first application is well over the top, but it is dependant on the number of
changes in the font cache.

After that, each application will launch quite quickly.

The other thing that slows it down is a "dirty" Normal.dotm or a bad
"Document Parts.dotx". You can re-name Normal.dotm. Word will rebuild it
the next time it launches.

If you have been playing around with Document Parts, you can copy a clean
copy in from the Office DVD. That's one that can't be rebuilt
automatically.

Cheers

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.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

Actually, you're doing quite well *60* seconds is horrible

Generally, this is very dependent on the number of fonts the user has
installed.

At first launch of the first application in the Office suite, it rebuilds
the font cache. If a user has a large number of fonts, then this will take
a while.

Once the cache has been built, a seven-to-ten second launch is about normal.

The other thing that slows it down is a "dirty" Normal.dotm. I am sharing a
Normal.dotm with Word 2007, which is not impressing either of them

Cheers

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.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

How much free memory do you have? Disk space? Which OS Verison?

While we are always hoping for performance improvements, they could be a
year away...

Maybe if we look, we can resolve the issue in the meantime.

Cheers

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

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[ccstephe]

Well, I've given up.... my three machines as well as machines I tested at the Apple store are starting slow.
It is not the fonts...I turned almost all of them off
It is not the machine speed...all over 2.2Ghz.. 1 dual G5, 1 Intel MacBook, 1 G4 PowerBook
It is not only the first start when it might be rebuilding the font cache
It is not the preferences and the normal.dotm file ...I've tossed them
It is not the cache....I've cleaned the Office cache
It is not the permissions...I've repaired them
and.......
Word still takes anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds to start. My Photoshop starts in less than 30 seconds!

I guess I should be happy that once it gets started it works fine but I'm not. I see people on other boards with the same problem so while this may not be a universal problem plenty of people do have this problem including computers in the Apple store. Word X starts up on my daughter G4 in 2 seconds as does Pages and Numbers on my machines. Thats what I would expect from an application that has taken years to get into the market. Tim said he is looking forward to eventual resolution guess I am to but in the meantime I've moved Word off my doc and am using Pages.

 

[DwightSchultz]

It’s funny to see people complaining about start-up times of 15 seconds while if I could have reached that speed I would be over the moon. Okay, you wanted some data on my machine. Here goes.

I run the latest model of MBP with 4 GB of RAM. I have around 10 GB free HD space available at all times and run nothing of network or externa disks.

I have a disk hooked up for nightly backup images and Time Machine.

I run the Gmail notification, iStat applications, and spaces in my task bar. I also run launchbar and do not use MS MyDay.

I’ve cut down the fonts turning almost everything off besides the system fonts.

The fun thing is that the slow start-up times are for ALL Microsoft applications not just one, so it seems to be something in the package itself. Starting an application (no matter which one) takes between 3 and 5 minutes. Once it runs it runs great.

For comparison, Photoshop starts in somewhere between 10 – 15 seconds!!

I’ve never had 2004 installed before. I did a full reinstall of 2008 but without any luck. I have tried a beta of 2008 before the release but uninstalled it before I installed the final release copy of 2008.

I hope anyone can help with this. If you need more information just let me know.

 

[Diane Ross]

I run the latest model of MBP with 4 GB of RAM. I have around 10 GB free HD
space available at all times and run nothing of network or externa disks.

That's not enough free space. It's supposed to be something like 10%. I bet
if you check you'll find you're paging out a lot slowing things down.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/performance2.html>

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

That's not enough free space. It's supposed to be something like 10%. I bet
if you check you'll find you're paging out a lot slowing things down.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/performance2.html>

I agree with Diane, not enough space. You should start getting nervous when
the boot drive's free space is around 25% of the drive capacity, and do
something drastic (like delete old and rarely used stuff) when it gets down
below 20%.

 

[DwightSchultz]

Good point. I will do a major cleanup and will let you know if has any effect on the speed.

Thanks!

 

[zulu007]

I just installed Office 2008 and I takes a verrrry long time for any of the
Office apps to launch. After some digging I found this article in the MS
support
site that explains some of the troubleshooting you can perform.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892959

I've tried the first one and it did work in safemode(all apps launch at
normal speeds).
But once I launch them in normal mode there slow again.

Not sure what to do next to fix the problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Specs:
MacPro - Leopard, Quad 2.66, 3GB Ram, 250GB HD.

 

[John McGhie]

Follow the article's advice on "Add-ins for Office Programs" first.

The slowdowns we're seeing in here seem to be:

* CPU not powerful enough (1.8 GHz is about the minimum)

* Not enough memory (2GB of RAM should be a minimum)

* Haxies (add-ins)

* Broken documents

* Broken templates

* Corrupted font caches.

Hope this helps

I just installed Office 2008 and I takes a verrrry long time for any of the
Office apps to launch. After some digging I found this article in the MS
support
site that explains some of the troubleshooting you can perform.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892959

I've tried the first one and it did work in safemode(all apps launch at
normal speeds).
But once I launch them in normal mode there slow again.

Not sure what to do next to fix the problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Specs:
MacPro - Leopard, Quad 2.66, 3GB Ram, 250GB HD.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[jordbrill]

Yep.  The first launch after a cold boot re-builds the font caches.  That
takes ((number of fonts) x n) seconds  A 30 to 60-second launch of the
first application is well over the top, but it is dependant on the number of
changes in the font cache.

After that, each application will launch quite quickly.

The other thing that slows it down is a "dirty" Normal.dotm or a bad
"Document Parts.dotx".  You can re-name Normal.dotm.  Word will rebuild it
the next time it launches.

If you have been playing around with Document Parts, you can copy a clean
copy in from the Office DVD.  That's one that can't be rebuilt
automatically.

Cheers





--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltdhttp://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia.  S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

The fix to the problem is very simple, i have written a full tutorial
on now to bring the load times to around 4 seconds here:
http://bbold.com/blog/apple/speed-up-microsoft-office-2008-for-mac/

 

[Diane Ross]

I've tried the first one and it did work in safemode(all apps launch at
normal speeds).
But once I launch them in normal mode there slow again.

Add your other applications back a few at a time to locate the problem. Much
like troubleshooting pref back in Classic.

 

[SMacSteve]

I too have been having this problem, but the interesting thing is that the apps have started to launch faster now. I can't say it's anything that I've done to make this happen. One thought though is that I've found that launching the app first and then opening the file is far faster! I'm going to do that from now on. Also, I've got a excel file that I have to work with that is extra ordinarily large at 160 or so MB's! It use to take nearly 3 minutes to open and now doing it after opening the app first it is much faster.

 

[Tim]

I tried a combination of removing the non-English language files (I had a ton in there although I don't remember being asked to install them) and i went into Font Book and noticed that I did have some Chineese and Japaneese and Korean fonts that I don't need/want. I removed those. Launched MS Office 2008 Project Gallery (I like to use that launcher to get to all my apps to not clutter up my dock) and it was super fast, and then launched Word-- 9 seconds. Thats extremely faster than what it was and very livable. It would launch even faster but the ribbon toolbar seems to take about 4 of those 9 seconds to completely paint in and put the cursor in typing mode. Not sure if that can be sped up at all but I'm happy with this fix on my system.

 

[DwightSchultz]

I finally fixed this issue but the solution wasn't a pretty one. I did a fresh reinstall of Leopard. Yep, you heard it here first, a complete reinstall resolves this issues (and costs about a day).

I got so tired of troubleshooting this issue this seemded like the final solution. Now Entourage starts in 20 seconds. Still not blazing fast, but much better compared to 10 minutes!!

Now all I need to troubleshoot is this damned increasing font size with every reply issue.

Oh well...

Please please please release an update soon Microsoft and fix some of these issues. Thank you!

 

[Diane Ross]

Now all I need to troubleshoot is this damned increasing font size with every
reply issue.

Switch to Plain Text. No more problems.