Speed of Word

[ljaencke]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Dear colleagues,
Is there someone out there who can explain me why Office 2008 is so slow? It is ridiculous that such an expensive software is much slower than cheaper software. If you compare for example Mellel (a MAC wordprocessor) with WORD one will be astomished to see the difference. We need WORD for our business routines and we cannot understand that MS is not able to develop a quick OFFICE suite. Anyway, is here someone out who can give me a comprehensive answer why the Office 2008 suite is so slow? By the way, Office on Vista is 10times faster than on MAC.
LJ

 

[John McGhie]

{Giggle} How much detail do you want on this?

The short answer is "Because that's the best they could do in the time
available."

Generically, the more features a piece of software has, the more code it
will contain, and thus the slower it will run, on equal hardware.

The Microsoft Office feature set is the largest there is. But all those
features mean lots of code, which requires lots of memory and takes lots of
CPU.

But that's not the whole story. Microsoft Office on an Intel Mac needs
about 2GB of RAM to go well. If the machines don't have that much, it will
slow down badly.

Office (and Windows) on the PC have been being optimised for 25 years.
That's a hell of a lot of efficiency improvement. Word on the Mac is almost
entirely fresh code, written from the ground up for a new operating system
and a new processor kind.

Although Unix has been around for years, Apple has not had time to do any
serious tuning for the Mac yet. Even on the mainframes it was designed for,
Unix is a bit slow when running a graphical user interface, because the user
interface runs as a relatively low priority task.

In the case of GUI software such as Microsoft Office, something like 80 per
cent of the machine cycles are burned up running user interface code, which
is all part of OS X or Windows, not Office.

Microsoft's Mac BU had to make such a huge effort to get even what we have
on sale by their delivery date, that they had to leave a lot of features
out, and had almost no time for tuning.

As a result, it is indeed a bit slow.

The product team at Microsoft is indeed well aware that performance is not
where they would like it to be. That will be a big focus of their
development efforts in the next version.

In the meantime, throw memory at the thing: it speeds it up a bit.

And yes, Word 2007 is dramatically faster than Word 2008, even running in
Vista under Parallels on this MacBook -- the benefit of 25 years of chipping
away at the code, one line at a time

Hope this helps

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Dear colleagues,
Is there someone out there who can explain me why Office 2008 is so slow? It
is ridiculous that such an expensive software is much slower than cheaper
software. If you compare for example Mellel (a MAC wordprocessor) with WORD
one will be astomished to see the difference. We need WORD for our business
routines and we cannot understand that MS is not able to develop a quick
OFFICE suite. Anyway, is here someone out who can give me a comprehensive
answer why the Office 2008 suite is so slow? By the way, Office on Vista is
10times faster than on MAC.
LJ

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

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]