Powerpoint - Mac vs PC

[Tom]

I have a laptop PC for work running Windows 2000 with Microsoft Office
2000 and a new Mac Pro with Office 2004 at home. I do PP presentations
for work and for family. Some are very large files - timed slide shows
with music and animation. Sometimes with more then 200 slides. I am
very frustrated with the Mac- PP runs very slow, it can take 10 times
as long to open a file and then I have constant crashes. I don't have
those problems with the PC. Do others have this probelm? Will
Microsoft make PP as anative application for Mac?? I had the same
issues with my Power Mac G4.

 

[king marsh]

I have a laptop PC for work running Windows 2000 with Microsoft Office
2000 and a new Mac Pro with Office 2004 at home. I do PP presentations
for work and for family. Some are very large files - timed slide shows
with music and animation. Sometimes with more then 200 slides. I am
very frustrated with the Mac- PP runs very slow, it can take 10 times
as long to open a file and then I have constant crashes. I don't have
those problems with the PC. Do others have this probelm? Will
Microsoft make PP as anative application for Mac?? I had the same
issues with my Power Mac G4.

If it is really troublesome to deal with powerpoint on Mac,
you can try this alternative:
View a PC made Powerpoint file on Mac with a web browser.

To do that, you should convert PC made powerpoint file to flash and
then you
can view this converted flash presentation on Mac just with a web
broweser.

For convert powerpoint to flash, you need a converter like PPT2Flash
Standard
http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash.php?sid=5

How to use it from
http://www.ppt-to-dvd.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1514

Free Trial from
http://www.sameshow.com/download/ppt2flash-download.php?sid=5

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Tom,

I wouldn't expect as much difference as you are seeing. I suspect there's
not enough RAM in the MacPro.

There's a handy little utility in the Applications > Utilities folder. Run
Activity Monitor and see what's eating up all your computing power.

Does your MacPro have a graphics card? OSX off-loads a lot of graphics
handling to the graphics cards these days. Does your graphics card have
plenty of RAM?

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

I have a laptop PC for work running Windows 2000 with Microsoft Office
2000 and a new Mac Pro with Office 2004 at home. I do PP presentations
for work and for family. Some are very large files - timed slide shows
with music and animation. Sometimes with more then 200 slides. I am
very frustrated with the Mac- PP runs very slow, it can take 10 times
as long to open a file and then I have constant crashes. I don't have
those problems with the PC. Do others have this probelm? Will
Microsoft make PP as anative application for Mac?? I had the same
issues with my Power Mac G4.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Tom]

Hi Tom,

I wouldn't expect as much difference as you are seeing. I suspect there's
not enough RAM in the MacPro.

There's a handy little utility in the Applications > Utilities folder. Run
Activity Monitor and see what's eating up all your computing power.

Does your MacPro have a graphics card? OSX off-loads a lot of graphics
handling to the graphics cards these days. Does your graphics card have
plenty of RAM?

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP



--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP infohttp://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

Jim, thanks for the reply. The Mac pro came with 1Gb 667 Mhz DDRZ FB -
Dimm. And the graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 with VRAM total
of 256MB.

I ran the Activity monitor and with the PP slide show open, the real
memory usage for PP was 790 MB. Other application including the
finder, dock etc was another total of another 20MB. That's a total
810, still below the 1GB.
Under System memory it says : usage 100.3MB, Active 604.5MB, Inactive
307.2 -total used 1012.3.
And free of 11.88

I am not sure what all that means??? So I need more Ram??

Thanks Tom

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Tom,

The video card sounds great, but yea - I'd bump up the RAM.

The computer is most likely using the hard drive as RAM substitute. Laptop
hard drives often spin less than 7200 rpm, which makes laptops even more
likely to exhibit slowness.

That being said, large presentations (especially ones with lots of large
graphics files) can still be slow at times even with lots of RAM. Every once
in a while I have to right-click on pictures that were imported from huge
files and save them as jpg. Then I delete the problem graphics from the
slide and import the JPEG I saved. Fortunately, only once in a while do I
see really big pictures causing much trouble.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

Jim, thanks for the reply. The Mac pro came with 1Gb 667 Mhz DDRZ FB -
Dimm. And the graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 with VRAM total
of 256MB.

I ran the Activity monitor and with the PP slide show open, the real
memory usage for PP was 790 MB. Other application including the
finder, dock etc was another total of another 20MB. That's a total
810, still below the 1GB.
Under System memory it says : usage 100.3MB, Active 604.5MB, Inactive
307.2 -total used 1012.3.
And free of 11.88

I am not sure what all that means??? So I need more Ram??

Thanks Tom

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Ebonweaver]

I don't believe this issue has anything to do with the hardware of the
machine. I have had this problem with every system I support, Powerpoint on
the mac simply can not handle large files. Interestingly, this problem gets
worse the more modern you get. On an old G4 iBook with OS 10.3.9 and Office
X, a 300 slide powerpoint file is a little sluggish, but it opens and is
workable. On that same system running 10.4.x and Office 2004, the same file
will never open, it just sits and spins forever. Under 10.4.x with Office X
it's about halfway between the two.

This tells me that something is wrong not only with the newer version of
Office, but the newer version of the Mac OS. Together, they make large
powerpoint files unusable. This same file opens instantly and moves at
light speed on a 3ghz P4 running XP Pro and Office 2003. Clearly Microsoft
and Apple aren't getting along very well code wise as time goes on. Even
running on the latest MacBook Pro it's unusable, which is very disappointing.
Fortunately I only have one user who feels the need to go over 50 slides
in a file, but convincing him there is no fix for this is difficult,
especially when there seems to continue to be no acknowledgment of this
issue in the tech community.

 

[CyberTaz]

Without more information it's hard to offer any suggestions for improving
performance, but based on the limited detail one thing I can tell you is
that the min. RAM requirement for 10.4 is twice that of 10.3 - 256 MB vs.
128 MB. The same is true for Office 2004 vs. Office X, so the fact that a
file of that size runs differently on the same system in 2 different
versions of the OS & 2 different versions of the program is no surprise at
all... Especially if the iBook is still fitted with the same 512 MB [or
less] configuration at which it shipped.

Also, "300 slides" doesn't really say much of anything... It's what's *on*
the slides that counts the most. That's what determines the actual file size
& most directly impacts performance.

Further, comparing performance of a G4 iBook (max. 1.42 GHz) to a 3 GHz
*anything* is somewhat less than objective... Not to mention that the PC
probably has considerably more RAM as well. We won't even touch on the fact
that the RAM for the newer systems is faster RAM, chip & bus architecture is
vastly improved, HD technology (SATA vs. ATA, 7200 RPM vs. 5600 RPM?) or
some of the other _minor_ differences.

Like I stated above I can't offer any suggestions... But then again I see
you didn't ask any questions

Good Luck |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

My experience affirms what you have stated.

Using smaller sized files for pictures helps a lot.

What resolution should I make my images for PowerPoint slide shows?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011163551033.aspx

-Jim

I don't believe this issue has anything to do with the hardware of the
machine. I have had this problem with every system I support, Powerpoint on
the mac simply can not handle large files. Interestingly, this problem gets
worse the more modern you get. On an old G4 iBook with OS 10.3.9 and Office
X, a 300 slide powerpoint file is a little sluggish, but it opens and is
workable. On that same system running 10.4.x and Office 2004, the same file
will never open, it just sits and spins forever. Under 10.4.x with Office X
it's about halfway between the two.

This tells me that something is wrong not only with the newer version of
Office, but the newer version of the Mac OS. Together, they make large
powerpoint files unusable. This same file opens instantly and moves at
light speed on a 3ghz P4 running XP Pro and Office 2003. Clearly Microsoft
and Apple aren't getting along very well code wise as time goes on. Even
running on the latest MacBook Pro it's unusable, which is very disappointing.
Fortunately I only have one user who feels the need to go over 50 slides
in a file, but convincing him there is no fix for this is difficult,
especially when there seems to continue to be no acknowledgment of this
issue in the tech community.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Ed]

I made a presentation, with music, on the mac using 08. The music will not play on the teachers pc. Slides and animation are ok. Any suggesstions, the presentation is tomorrow.

 

[Lucy Thomson]

Hi Ed

Have a look here:
PC to Mac and Back
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00281.htm

and here:
Sounds/Movies don't play, images disappear or links break when I move or
email a presentation
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00155.htm

Lucy

 

[The angry scientist]

The speed of powerpoint on Macs is a HUGE issue, and it is NOT hardware-related. I routinely give presentations with a new MacBook Pro (2GB RAM) using Office 04 previously, and now Office 08. I love everything else on the Mac, so I deal with the extremely sluggish performance of powerpoint. As an A-B comparison, I opened the same file on an old P4 Windows machine running Office 03 (1GB memory) and my MacBook (far superior hardware). The PC completely smoked it. Entering text was fluid and reliable, whereas there's a delay when typing on the Mac Office 08. Then there's Office 04...don't get me started. Powerpoint files that are sluggish on Office 08 are virtually unusable on Office 04. The only solution as I see it is to install Windows on the Mac. I've avoided it for a long time, but now I've had it. I thought Office 08 would be the last step in making the Mac better in all ways for me, but I was very wrong. I haven't even begun to complain about the travesty that is Excel '08 with no custom error bars (amongst many other issues). Shame on you, you just completely eliminated the entire tech community from using your product, which is inferior in EVERY way to Office 07 on Windows.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

The speed of powerpoint on Macs is a HUGE issue, and it is NOT hardware-related. I routinely give presentations with a new MacBook Pro (2GB RAM) using Office 04 previously, and now Office 08. I love everything else on the Mac, so I deal with the extremely sluggish performance of powerpoint. As an A-B comparison, I opened the same file on an old P4 Windows machine running Office 03 (1GB memory) and my MacBook (far superior hardware). The PC completely smoked it. Entering text was fluid and reliable, whereas there's a delay when typing on the Mac Office 08. Then there's Office 04...don't get me started. Powerpoint files that are sluggish on Office 08 are virtually unusable on Office 04. The only solution as I see it is to install Windows on the Mac. I've avoided it for a long time, but now I've had it. I thought Office 08 would be the last step in making the Mac better in all ways for me, but I was very wrong. I haven't even begun to complain about the travesty that is Excel

'08 with no custom error bars (amongst many other issues). Shame on you, you just completely eliminated the entire tech community from using your product, which is inferior in EVERY way to Office 07 on Windows.

Hi,

Venting to the public newsgroup may make you feel better, but the folks
who visit here are not the folks who created Office 2008.

That would be the Microsoft Mac Business Unit.

Each product has its own channel that you can use to let the developers
and product managers know what you are thinking. Use Help > Send
Feedback for each product.

Thanks.

-Jim