word/excel:mac 12.2.3 on leopard: slow

[Mathias Koerber]

word and excel on leopard are exceedingly slow.
I just found that word always goes to 'spinning wheel' when
i just move the cursor over the 'work' menu.

Is there a way to even remove the work menu to avoid that?

clicking 'help' also starts a spinning ball

another triggere of extreme slowness is switching windows (diff
documents open) or moving between spaces.

Any hints how to cure these?

 

[Diane Ross]

Any hints how to cure these?

See this page for suggestions. Many pertain specifically to Entourage
but many are general to all Office applications.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/crashes.html>

 

[Mathias Koerber]

word and excel on leopard are exceedingly slow.
I just found that word always goes to 'spinning wheel' when
i just move the cursor over the 'work' menu.

Is there a way to even remove the work menu to avoid that?

clicking 'help' also starts a spinning ball

another triggere of extreme slowness is switching windows (diff
documents open) or moving between spaces.

Here is another: just moving the mouse over 'Open recent >' in the File
menu makes the ball spin for a good minute or longer.

Note that my macbook has 4GB of RAM.

There must be something fundamentally wrong...

 

[Mathias Koerber]

Here is another: just moving the mouse over 'Open recent >' in the File
menu makes the ball spin for a good minute or longer.

Note that my macbook has 4GB of RAM.

There must be something fundamentally wrong...

Heck, just switching between two documents open (each less than 1 page
large) takes 1 minute or more.. sheesh

 

[Jim Gordon Mac MVP]

Here is another: just moving the mouse over 'Open recent>' in the File
menu makes the ball spin for a good minute or longer.

Note that my macbook has 4GB of RAM.

There must be something fundamentally wrong...

Do you have your hard drive(s) set to spin down? The delay you happens
when Excel waits for Mac OS, which waits for the hard drive to spin up
before anything else can happen.

-Jim

 

[Mathias Koerber]

Do you have your hard drive(s) set to spin down? The delay you happens
when Excel waits for Mac OS, which waits for the hard drive to spin up
before anything else can happen.

Nope.

I think office is just paging? If I try to bring one document
to the foreground, it takes a loong while. if I then move to another app
(space), suddenly later Office grabs the foreground, moves to its space,
just to show me the spinning ball again. I *have* to wait until the
spinning ball is shown and do nothing else to make that vicious cycle stop.

I notice that while all this happens, MacOSX has ca .8GB of 'inactive
memory' and the office processes are huge.

I think at the next opportunity I will uninstall office and try
reinstalling if afresh...

 

[Mathias Koerber]

Here is someone describing the exact same thing with Word and Excel.
Funnily it does not seem to affect PowerPoint.

And yes, I have tuned my autosave to 15 minutes with no resolution.

 

[Mathias Koerber]

I've gotten one step further. When i edit local documents, it's
not that bad (still noticeable lag, but bearable), but anything from a
SMB share is hell.

Even if I have no frequent saves, it seems Word constantly is in
communication with the disk where the document resides and re-reads
or does whatever. I am not using embedded stuff that it may have to
notice changing in the background.

is there a way to make it stop that? I can live with it saving a copy
every 10 minutes or so (but then I direct those to the local disk
anyway), but this constant looking at the disk when I edit the file is
totally killing performance.

My workaround now is to copy the file to a local disk, edit it there and
copy it back. Not nice but much more bearable

 

[Rob Schneider]

The info about "smb share" is new. I don't have experience with this
problem, but others here will surely comment.

Meantime, google "mac word smb slow" and there is some info there which
may help.


--rms

www.rmschneider.com