[smileLP]

i have 11.1 and it is TOO SLOW, even on a new 2.5 x 2 G5

i want to go back to the olderst version of word that will run in OS X

i've already tried 10.1 and it IS faster

older = smaller program size = faster

so, anything older than 10.1 work is OS X?

AND is there a downside to what i'm doing?

i'm not impressed w/any of the "improvements" in word 2004

thanks!

[Millennium]

You could probably get Word 5.1 (it is generally accepted that 6.0 is to be avoided) to run in Classic. Microsoft sold 5.1 alongside the 6.0 series for a long time, but I don't know if they sell either of them anymore.

I mention 5.1 simply because it has by far the best reputation of all of the pre-OSX Word ports, though Word 98 had a decent reputation as well. 5.1, however, is probably more likely to work.

The major downaide to this is that none of these Word ports were written in Carbon, so you get none of the benefits of that API. In particular, you will be restricted to 32-character filenames.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by smileLP:
i have 11.1 and it is TOO SLOW, even on a new 2.5 x 2 G5

What the heck are you trying to do ?
And what the heck did you expect from M$ ?

-t

[smileLP]

hi,

what i'm 'trying to do' is "COMPLICATED" tasks like underlining a word, which takes 1-2 secs. in word 11.1, and is instantaneous in 10.1

and god help me w/my really gigantic word docs (mailing lists, etc.), it is so slow you wouldn't believe it, and yet, in OS 9, w/word 6, it was very fast

anyway, re the suggestion to go back to classic/word 5.1, i'd be willing, but what about all the many docs. i've already saved in 11.1? would i have to go back, find each one, and re-save it in 5.1? will it even let me do that?

AND, is running word in classic a hassle? i mean, i can put it in the [start-up folder], but does it then slow me down each time i open a diff word doc, which i do all the time?

thanks to all!

[turtle777]

Originally posted by smileLP:
what i'm 'trying to do' is "COMPLICATED" tasks like underlining a word, which takes 1-2 secs. in word 11.1, and is instantaneous in 10.1

On a Dual 2.5 GHz ?

Something must be seriously wrong with your installation of Word !

I don't have Word 11.1, but if that was standard behaviour, anything short of a G5 should be unusable. I have never heared that it was THAT bad.

-t

[alphasubzero949]

Originally posted by turtle777:
On a Dual 2.5 GHz ?

Something must be seriously wrong with your installation of Word !

I don't have Word 11.1, but if that was standard behaviour, anything short of a G5 should be unusable. I have never heared that it was THAT bad.

-t

Agreed; there's definitely something wrong with the installation. Office '04 runs fine on a 1 GHz PowerBook G4.

[ryaxnb]

My 900 Mhz iBook G3 runs MS Word v.X (haven't got 2004 yet) happily - A G5 should. If not, consider iWork, Mellel Write, or AbiWord, or OpenOffice.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by smileLP:
anyway, re the suggestion to go back to classic/word 5.1, i'd be willing, but what about all the many docs. i've already saved in 11.1? would i have to go back, find each one, and re-save it in 5.1? will it even let me do that?

I don't know if it'll let you go back that far, but if it does then yes, that's what you'll have to do.

AND, is running word in classic a hassle? i mean, i can put it in the [start-up folder], but does it then slow me down each time i open a diff word doc, which i do all the time?

Starting up Word for the first time will be much slower, because you have to boot Classic (unless, of course, Classic is already running). However, once Classic and Word are running, there should be no performance hit when switching between documents.

[discotronic]

Have you tried turning off the auto format and word count "features". I found that doing that will give a slight performance increase.

I have an iBook 300MHz and it does better with Word than what your G5 is doing. Sounds like something is wrong with the installation to me.

[smileLP]

yes, i've done all those little things like turning off auto-erect, etc. to boost speed; all w/little or no effect

i should say that the word document that gives me the most trouble is a 500 pg. 6 MB doc. is that too much for even my G5?

thanks again

p.s. how does word/office get "installed incorrectly"? i mean, i had this computer techie guy do it. thanks

[Millennium]

Six megs for a 500-page document? Ouch; if you don't mind my asking, what is it for?

Word has a "fast save" feature; have you been using it? If so, you might want to consider saving a copy normally (i.e. not fast-saving), and without saving the revisions. Unless you have huge graphics in the file, this file should be at least 60% smaller, and it will probably run much faster.

Of course, if you actually need the revision history then this won't help you. However, most people don't need that, and the revisions can swallow huge amounts of space over time.

[smileLP]

ok, it's actually TEN mgs for a 375 pg. document, it's a mailing list (& yes, i have thought about putting it in excel)

any time my word (Office X, or Office '04) opens this baby, my G5 starts roaring like a helicopter taking off

i'll do those other little things you suggest, but typically they don't really help much

thanks anyway

[turtle777]

Originally posted by smileLP:
turning off auto-erect

-t

[turtle777]

Originally posted by smileLP:
ok, it's actually TEN mgs for a 375 pg. document

Problem solved. What were you thinking ? Word is not made for these kind of things !

Excel would be a better choice, Filemaker would be a much better choice.

-t

[TETENAL]

Excel isn't a database.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by smileLP:
ok, it's actually TEN mgs for a 375 pg. document, it's a mailing list (& yes, i have thought about putting it in excel)

If it's that big, then something is seriously wrong. Project Gutenberg's translation of Les Miserables runs some 1769 pages -four times as long as your file- and yet it's only three megs. Granted, PG's version is plain ASCII text, but even Word shouldn't be able to bloat a document's size by that much.

Do you have images associated with the addresses in your mailing list? Or, perhaps, do you use a lot of formatting (bold, italics, underline, or whatever)? I'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on, such that the file size is that huge. If we can fix this, then we may be able to fix your speed problem.

Actually, if at all possible, could you post a snippet of the file? No need to post real addresses -you can make them up however you want- but do it the same way that you'd do it for your address book file. This may help us figure out what's going on.

[smileLP]

thanks for all your help

the document is a word document that has 11,000 names and addresses in it

each address is on a single line

each single line, and in fact the whole document, is made up of 5 columns

so, column 1 has the person's name, column 2 their street address, etc.

no special formatting, picture, etc., whatever. in fact it's all in the same font and font size

it seems we can't even agree in this thread if the doc is so big that it would be inherently slow, or if even larger docs are fast

- - -

i'm confused: is excel NOT a good choice to move this giant file into?

and is filemaker something that comes w/office? (i doubt it). would it be good for what i have described?

thanks again

[cpac]

Filemaker is made by a subsidiary of Apple, and would be great for that sort of a database (but no, it doesn't come with Office).

Excel would be better than Word, but not as good as Filemaker.

Now, if that's all a huge table in the Word document, with 11,000+ rows, I'm not surprised at all that it's slow.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by smileLP:
the document is a word document that has 11,000 names and addresses in it

each address is on a single line

each single line, and in fact the whole document, is made up of 5 columns

This might be your problem. Is this a table or something? Word is not designed to do this. It is a word processor, not a database. Excel is probably better than Word for this, but Excel isn't a database too, it's a spreadsheet.

This is a task for a database application like Filemaker. AppleWorks also has a database module.

[smileLP]

ok, i hear what y'all are saying about switching to excel, or better yet, filemaker for this type of huge database "document"

BUT i just want to point out that on my old 266 mhz OS 9 mac, this huge document/data base was very very fast; absolutely no probs

i'm willing to go filemaker or whatever, but it's just frustrating that on a computer 10-20 X faster, the document is 5X slower. i know the newer versions of word are much bigger (adding bells and whistles and all), but this is progress?

[cpac]

have you done the standard word speed-ups like turning off grammar check and live word count? I can imagine that with a list of names, things would be extremely slow to begin with as Word attempts to check all those 11000+ names, etc.

I'd give that a shot.

If not, you can always use an old version of Word in Classic

Regardless, you should feel free to email (or better, write) Microsoft and complain about the performance of their Software.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by smileLP:
each single line, and in fact the whole document, is made up of 5 columns

so, column 1 has the person's name, column 2 their street address, etc.

no special formatting, picture, etc., whatever. in fact it's all in the same font and font size

How do you make the columns? Do you just use tabs, or do you actually have columns set up in Word? This is important, because depending on how you've done this I think I may have a solution.

i'm confused: is excel NOT a good choice to move this giant file into?

It'll get the job done, but a database would be better.

and is filemaker something that comes w/office? (i doubt it). would it be good for what i have described?

FileMaker would work, but it doesn't come with Office. On Windows, a stripped-down database called Access comes with Office, but Microsoft hasn't made a Mac port of that in a very long time. I'm not sure that the last port of it would even run in Classic.

[smileLP]

i have set up columns, and then tab in between the columns to enter the data

what's frustrating is, all these posters saying how word is not the right program to get the speed i need for this data base

but word v 6 in OS 9 was plenty fast, and that w/a 266 mhz mac

does anyone have an explanation for why my old computer and version of word was just fine, even w/this huge doc/data base, but a 2 x 2.5 in OS X is literally 5-10X slower??

thanks fer lissening

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by smileLP:
thanks fer lissening

thengs fer spellcheggin

Might be sloppy programming. Might be Microsoft added features that are a great help for people who use Word as a word processor like on the fly spell checking, word counting, Unicode support or whatever Microsoft thinks is great for word processing, and these features made it slower for people who use Word as a database. Word is not intended as a database so whatever Microsoft changes they don't check how changes affect use as a database.

Use a program for what it's intended to be used, and then you can complain (and there's probably still plenty to complain about in Word), but if you use it as something it never was intended to be you have no grounds.

[macmike42]

I have to ask a question. Word on X has always been a fat hog. Up until now I figured all the people using Word for a database on any platform had been spoken to. However, in my personal experience, Word 2004 is the best performing Word yet.

I do not see any delay in applying formatting or when typing, nor does Word use any CPU when sitting in the background with a blank document. All previous versions of Word would consitently use 10-15% when idle. For the first time ever since moving to OS X, I have my preferred AutoFormat settings enabled, as well as the live spelling and grammar checkers. VBA macros that used to bomb Word & Excel now run, edit, and compile fine. The VBA editor is still a bizzare experience, but whatever. (Keep VS6 away from my Mac, bad enough I have to use it at work.) For the first time I actually feel it was money well spent, and I haven't cursed the Mac BU for quite some time now.

My OS is 10.3.7 and machine is an iBook G4 1.2 w/768MB RAM.

So the question is: Has anyone else experienced Word 2004 to be an actually usable, bordering-on-tolerable word processor for Mac?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by smileLP:
i have set up columns, and then tab in between the columns to enter the data

I'm still not entirely sure I understand, but it seems as though we're using very different terms. If I'm right, though, then we may be on to something.

what's frustrating is, all these posters saying how word is not the right program to get the speed i need for this data base

but word v 6 in OS 9 was plenty fast, and that w/a 266 mhz mac

does anyone have an explanation for why my old computer and version of word was just fine, even w/this huge doc/data base, but a 2 x 2.5 in OS X is literally 5-10X slower??

I'm afraid not, but as others have mentioned, bloat is a good candidate. As hardware speed has increased, programmers have become less and less concerned with performance. In some cases, it may not be so much "sloppy programming" as just less-optimized code (which can still be very good, just not the fastest way of doing things).

The file format is likely another problem. There's just plain more data to lug around then there used to be. There are, in some cases, very good reasons for this; the Word file format lets you store a surprising variety of data, and Word itself can do a surprising number of things with it. But in order to make that happen, you have to store more metadata, and often you have to structure things in certain ways, and that can make the file much bigger even though your data stays the same size. Even once the data is loaded into RAM, it still has to be stored in certain ways in order to be able to work with it.

Another thing to note is that Word really isn't suited to this. It's a general-purpose word processor, and as such it has to be able to do many things that you don't ever use with your address book. More specific file formats can't do as much, but if they do what you want they can usually do it better, simply because they don't have to perform quite as much gymnastics with the data.

Your idea of putting it into an Excel spreadsheet is a good one. You'd never want to use Excel as a word processor, but it already has a concept of rows and columns built in; you don't have to try and fake it with tabs and newlines. This alone will help crunch the size down some. Furthermore, it does its formatting cell-by-cell, rather than using arbitrary blocks of text, so it doesn't have to store as much formatting information (not that you use any, from what I can tell, but the Word file still has to have some placeholder info whereas Excel does not).

However, even though Excel will do better than Word, it's possible to do even better than that by using a database. Databases work using records and fields, which you're using rows and columns to represent, so it's even closer to what your data really means. Databases don't usually store their own formatting information, but you're not using any, so that's not a problem. They tend to be optimized for only two things: getting data into the database, and searching for data inside it (you can view the entire database by doing a search which would return everything in it). This makes them great for things like address books.

Unfortunately, as others have mentioned, there is no Access-like database for the Mac. The closest thing out there is probably FileMaker, but that doesn't run cheap.