PowerPoint for Mac incredibly slow

[David Glickman]

I recently switched to Mac OS X (Panther) from Windows XP. All in all,
a fabulous switch - the Mac is a joy to use. The one problem I
continually face is that, hands down, PowerPoint on the PC is easier
to use and MUCH faster. Everything in PowerPoint for Mac is extremely
sluggish, including but not limited to: switching to slide sorter,
typing, moving graphics, etc.

I'm using a PowerBook 15" with 1 GB of RAM. Latest version of Panther
and latest version of PowerPoint (just installed the update a few days
ago).

Does anyone know of any tricks to speed up PowerPoint for the Mac.
Unfortunately I have to use PowerPoint quite a bit and it's downright
painful on a Mac.

- David

 

[Michael Grant]

David,

I see from the lack of responses to your post that there is really
nothing any of us can do right now about the dismal powerpoint mac
performance issue except complain to Microsoft so they get with it and
fix the issues. There have been MANY postings about this issue and so
far I have seen nothing from any of the MVPs or Microsoft themselves
addressing the issue.

I have said that I appreciate MS's support of the Mac and I find that
the rest of the Office apps on the Mac are excellent, although I use
them less than Powerpoint. Like you, I converted to the Mac from
Windows and, being a heavy powerpoint user, I am terribly frustrated
with the lack of matching features and performance. Some of those are:

- Very slow redraws of complex slides.
- Slide sorter is unusable even on a dual G4 with 1 gig of RAM.
- Quicktime support is limited and playback performance sucks.
- Even after SP1 there are still redraw problems with text boxes
leaving trails on screen.
- No MOTION PATHS!!!!!
- No full screen movie playback. Let's say you want to embed a movie
and then have it play full screen from the slide and return to the
slide when done. Can't do it. Is that just amazing?

I would encourage the Mac Powerpoint team to seriously get on fixing
these issues and at least acknowledge that they are problems via some
technotes or something so that we mac users can get some idea that MS
is aware of the issues and is working to fix them. SP1 was a BIG
disappointment since it didn't seem to fix any of these issues except
for the very obvious Grid placement issue with graphics.

I hope MS gets around to it SOON. I continue to recommend to my Mac
friends that they hold off upgrading to 2004 if they use PPT a lot
since it is so painful.

-m

 

[Gregg]

I basically bought a PC just for this reason. I do alot of work on
PowerPoint. I need to send and receive to client who has PCs. I was
doing so much work on MAC and once I went over to clients to fix
something and couldn't believe how much faster and responsive it was.
Also some cross platform issues would occur now and then, so I
basically bought a Dell cheapie just for PowerPoint! Use Mac for
everything else.

 

[Mike Benns]

Agreed with all of these points - Powerpoint is so bad on the Mac, one
wonders if MS are even trying to sort them so we all have to go and
buy a dreaded PC running XP.

Sort it out MS!!