Office 2008 sloooow

Just updated to Office for Mac 2008 (my imac is now 3 yr old so it's not an Intel chip). It takes about 30 seconds to open a document!

Anyone else with this issue?

 

Office 2008 on my macbook pro (intel) is extremely fast and MUCH better than 2004. Not sure why yours would be slow.

 

Office 2008 offers huge improvements in performance for Intel Macs and Intel Macs alone. Benchmarks wise, it actually operates slower than Office 2004 on PPC Macs.

 

are universal binaries coded well for pre-intels?

 

I think it's not a matter of coding well or not in the case of universal binaries, as it is in essence the same bit of code, but compiled in different ways.

Previously, Intel Macs had to practically translate every line of code in a PPC compiled application into instructions that can be executed on Intel architecture. This resulted in huge slowdowns for Intel Macs, despite them having far more powerful and advanced hardware.
Therefore, the improvements in speed between say, a 2Ghz Core2Duo CPU and a 1Ghz G4 CPU were not obvious when running Office 2004.

With Office 2008, the application is compiled to be run specifically both on the Intel architecture and the PPC architecture, and as a result, the difference in speed between the architectures can be visibly seen.
It is therefore no surprise that a dual core 64bit Intel system can run Office 2008 at much higher speeds than a single G4 PPC system.
It is not because Office 2008 is poorly coded to be run on PPC, but because the PPC architecture is getting old.

However, as I am not a Mac developer, the bit I wrote above is only what I speculate. Perhaps the slowdowns are caused by Microsoft using rubbish libraries for the PPC side of things.

 

I find Office 2008 is pretty slow to open each actual program - slower than 2004 was on my MBP. But the documents seem to open in a timely manner...

 

The first few times that I opened and used Word 2008 it seemed a bit slow. It may sound crazy, but after updating to 10.5.2 all 2008 programs seem to be more responsive and overall a bit faster.

 

My speed did not improve whatsoever. I had office 04 and it sucked. I upgraded to office 08 and it sucked even more. It opens way slower than 04.
Office 07 for windows is the best and nothing can even compete with it.
Updating from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 did not improve any speed in office for me.

 

Unfortunately I have to agree, I have Office 2008 and the launch times are very slow even on cached launches. I also have the Windows version Office 2007 running in XP on VMware and it's almost instant on opening Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I just can't understand what MS has done to the Mac version, almost seems like it was done on purpose.
I used to have the old PowerPC version Office 2004 running on my G5 and it used to fly. It was so quick at launching the entire suite.

 

I have to append my previous comment - saving in Excel 2008 causes the computer to hang for quite a bit. It could be because I'm using a worksheet that has a lot of other sheets linked to it, but it never took this long (I'm talking 45 seconds of watching that wheel spin) for it to save in 2004.

 

Until Microsoft has a serious competitor in the word processing market, the consumers will continue to see the same. I can live with the speed of Office 08 but what really gets me is its total refusal to play nice with Spaces. Its like it doesn't want to be on OS X. If Apple can code in better compatibility with Pages and Numbers I would switch in a heart beat. The only reason office 08 has space on my hard drive is because of compatibility reasons; and I think its like that for the majority of office 08 users.

 

The only thing I can speak of that's REALLY slow about Office 2008 is that Word 2008 takes FOREVER to open the first time. Heck, if you close it and re-open it, it still takes a while to open. When I think about how fast Office 2003/2007 opened on my old Windows PC, it's pretty bad that Office 2008 MAC is so slow to start up.

 

Makes you wonder what they did to it internally.