Very slow booting up an Office 2004 app

[armil]

When I boot up an Office 2004 app for the first time each day, the app
takes an unusual length of time. I can see various elements in the app
being checked in a reasonable time but " Optimizing font menu
performance" is very slow. What's wrong here?

Armil

 

[CyberTaz]

As you've observed, this is primarily a font issue, but it wouldn't hurt to
use Repair Disk Permissions - most people don't use it enough, anyway.

In addition to that, Mac OS doesn't load fonts into RAM on system startup
the way a Windows PC does. Instead, they're loaded when the application
starts up. The more fonts, the longer the startup time. If you have dozens
of fonts which neither you nor the OS require you would do well to remove
them... you'd be surprised what a difference it can make.

It will also slow things considerably if you have wysiwyg font lists enabled
(listing font names using the actual font). Using standard display of font
names will also quicken the startup process.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

As you've observed, this is primarily a font issue, but it wouldn't hurt to
use Repair Disk Permissions - most people don't use it enough, anyway.

In addition, if you use a Font management utility (including font book)
and activate/deactivate fonts, Word will have to rebuild the font cache
next time you launch it. Every time the list of available fonts changes,
th app will rebuild the cache :-\


Corentin

 

[Mickey Stevens]

Do you use a networked home folder on different machines? In that case,
Entourage has to optimize the font list each time you launch the
applications on a different computer.

 

[Henri Arsenault]

Do you use a networked home folder on different machines? In that case,
Entourage has to optimize the font list each time you launch the
applications on a different computer.

Remember that for the moment, Office on Intel Macs is running in
emulation mode until Microsoft comes out with an Intel version for the
Mac, so based on other emulation software speeds, one should expect it
to run about 3 times slower than on PowerPC Macs. Of course it could be
something else.

If you have an Intel Mac and if you have a PC version of Office, maybe
you should conisder running it under Windows. If you are lucky like me,
your organization wouls have licenses for Windows and for both Mac and
Windows versions of Office.

Anybody know how long it will be before Microsoft comes out with a
version of Office for Intel Macs?

Henri

 

[Henri Arsenault]

Hi Henri,



I think this is not true at all. The magazine MacTech did extensive tests
and reported them here:
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.05/Office2004Benchmark/

They concluded Office under Rosetta runs about the same speed, maybe a
little slower in places, but certainly not 3 times as slowly.

On my G5 Mac dual processor, the Word project screen comes up in less
than a second. On my Intel Mac, it takes about 6 seconds. I find the
Office speed quite acceptable on my IntelMac, but it is cetainly slower
than on the G5.

Henri

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

On my G5 Mac dual processor, the Word project screen comes up in less
than a second. On my Intel Mac, it takes about 6 seconds. I find the
Office speed quite acceptable on my IntelMac, but it is cetainly slower
than on the G5.

Yes, it's been reported that it takes longer to _launch_ PPC apps in
Rosetta. But I don't find 6 seconds a big deal. And all reports so far have
said that the speed difference _running_ the Office apps is hardly
noticeable. Nothing even remotely resembling "3 times slower", just a few
percent. I'd expect that opening slides in PowerPoint might take a worse
hit, but I don't have first-hand experience. And the other apps are meant to
be very acceptable.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
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PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[armil]

Thanks to CyberTaz & Corentin my Office 2004 boot problem is history.
Deactivating and deleting a lot of unneeded fonts using FontBook and
poof, it loads in a heartbeat.

And thanks to all those who chimed in, I learned a lot from you all.

Arnie