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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > why did upgrading to tiger slow down MS Word??

why did upgrading to tiger slow down MS Word??
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smileLP
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Jul 8, 2005, 12:21 PM
 
twin 2.5 G5 here

i have some very large word docs, w/columns and things that got slowed down when i went to OS X

now i have upgraded to tiger and they got slowed down even more

anyone know why this might be?

anybody have an idea on how to speed things up?

thanks
     
CatOne
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Jul 8, 2005, 12:36 PM
 
Slowed down in what way?
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 8, 2005, 12:38 PM
 
when i type, the characters actually take a moment to appear

also, when i delete something, there is a slight pause before it goes away

that kind of stuff...

thanks
     
Randman
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Jul 8, 2005, 01:01 PM
 
How did you install Tiger? Maybe try a reinstall of Office.

This is a computer-generated message and needs no signature.
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 8, 2005, 01:03 PM
 
it was a clean install, administered by a computer professional

he said he'd 'never heard of word slowing down after upgrading to tiger'

but clearly that is what has happened

thanks
     
saddino
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Jul 8, 2005, 01:30 PM
 
I have a similar problem: Word and Excel will beachball (right after launching, and every few minutes afterwards) for about five seconds a pop. Still waiting for MS to provide a patch...
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 8, 2005, 01:33 PM
 
pardon my ignorance, but 'beachball' means unwanted pause or some such?

do we know if a patch is in the works?

thanks

btw, the problem is mostly noticeable in his HUGE word doc that has columns and mega pages
     
saddino
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Jul 8, 2005, 01:37 PM
 
"Beachball" means Apple's multi-colored spinning cursor appears as the applications "locks." Not sure if this is identical to the "pauses" you're getting.

(and I have no idea whether a patch is actually coming or not, I'm just hoping one does...)
     
doucy2
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Jul 8, 2005, 02:15 PM
 
its is def a problem with office
because it did the same thing on my old ibok g3 800
ThinkMac.org

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Don Pickett
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Jul 8, 2005, 02:58 PM
 
Word has always been a dog for me under all versions of OS X, and the scrolling has always been awful.
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
MartiNZ
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Jul 8, 2005, 04:58 PM
 
Word is slower and crashes under Tiger, full stop. Microsoft has yet to put anything anywhere acknowledging this, and have yet to provide a 'service pack' to fix Office at all since Tiger. The fact that even their Error Reporter program crashes and won't load seems to me to make even more of a mockery of them than they manage to on their own .
     
Don Pickett
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Jul 8, 2005, 11:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by MartiNZ
Word is slower and crashes under Tiger, full stop. Microsoft has yet to put anything anywhere acknowledging this, and have yet to provide a 'service pack' to fix Office at all since Tiger. The fact that even their Error Reporter program crashes and won't load seems to me to make even more of a mockery of them than they manage to on their own .
Not to rain on your parade, but I haven't had one crash with Word or Excel under Tiger, and I've used them both a lot. Word is slower than molasses in January, tho.
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
osxrules
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Jul 9, 2005, 11:52 PM
 
Have you tried NeoOffice? It's OpenOffice that runs natively on OS X i.e. doesn't use X11. I don't even use M$ Office any more because it was too bloated. NeoOffice has the same features - spreadsheet, equation editor and word format support. Best of all it's free.
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 10, 2005, 01:28 PM
 
can i import a large MSWord doc, w/tables, columns, etc., into this neo-office?

i would not be able to re-type everything

thanks
     
osxrules
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Jul 10, 2005, 02:54 PM
 
NeoOffice supports the Word format so you just open it up. You open/save in Word formats natively.

Best thing to do is just download it and try it out. There are two limitations with the software it says on the site - Image resolution is limited to 300dpi while printing and there's no plugin or applet support but it's highly unlikely you'll need those. It works great for everything I've used it for. It even opened a CSV file with nearly 100,000 cells in it without a hitch.

I find it's about as responsive on my Mac Mini as office was but it doesn't crash as often. It takes a while to launch but that's because it is based on Java. It takes ages the first time because it is checking fonts etc. The good thing is it also uses the Mac OS X fonts unlike OpenOffice, which bundles its own.

download it here and see what it's like:

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php

If it isn't what you need or it's just as slow as office for you, you can try optimising office. Turning off autosave and auto-correction usually relieves a lot of the performance at the expense of allowing you to write gibberish. It does encourage you to be a better writer though.

When I was at university and I had to write a big report, I actually used LaTeX, which allowed me to separate my document into manageable chunks and then when you are finished, you compile it together. I reckon Word probably has a way to do that too ( http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ITS/info/traini.../word/thesis2/ ) and it's certainly worth checking out. Having small documents open at a time means less stress on the system.
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 10, 2005, 08:59 PM
 
thanks for the neooffice suggestion, but close but no cigar

for starters, i open this documetn 50X a day, and as you warned, it's slow to open

also, a lot of other little things different, that aren't too workable

but nice try!
     
jock
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Jul 10, 2005, 09:47 PM
 
I can tell you that with Office 2004 Mickeysoft rewrote the screen drawings to use open GL, this is evident on their boards if you have a look under Powerpoint. I fell into this trap as I couldn't understand why powerpoint was painfully slow to open a modest 120 pic slideshow, but in Office X it was well not quite speedy but acceptable. Hopefully an update wull cure this.
     
Graymalkin
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Jul 10, 2005, 11:56 PM
 
No one is bothering to mention what version of Office 2004 they're running. On Tiger I noticed a big difference between version 11.0.1 and 11.1, the latter being the latest update to the suite. If you did a straight install off of the retail disk you're probably running 11.0.1 or 11.0 depending on the age of your disk. Try the latest update and see how things work out then.

If you're noticing delays when you type or delete things you might want to think about turning off the grammar checker and check-as-you-type spellcheck. Every time you make a change these two features are going to have to do some processing, on a fast system with a lot of RAM you aren't likely to notice a speed hit, on an older slower machine without a lot of memory this is likely to be perceptible.
     
smileLP  (op)
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Jul 11, 2005, 12:28 AM
 
i'm (original poster here) actually running 2003. 2004 was even more bloated and slower so i went back to 2003. also, lots of people keep suggesting to turn off the spell check stuff, etc., but i have never found this to make a difference in how fast things move in large docs. in MS Word. my experience is that it makes no difference
     
Chuckit
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Jul 11, 2005, 12:44 AM
 
Office 2003 was never released for the Mac (nor 2004 for Windows), so I don't really know how you'd use them interchangeably.
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smileLP  (op)
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Jul 11, 2005, 12:48 AM
 
this confused me too

the folder sez MS Office X

the app sez word 2003

i don't remember how i ended up w/this

i do remember trying the very first MS for OS X (word x?), and the most recent (2004), and i THOUGHTsomethign in betw that i settled on
     
Don Pickett
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Jul 11, 2005, 01:16 AM
 
Originally Posted by Graymalkin
No one is bothering to mention what version of Office 2004 they're running. On Tiger I noticed a big difference between version 11.0.1 and 11.1, the latter being the latest update to the suite. If you did a straight install off of the retail disk you're probably running 11.0.1 or 11.0 depending on the age of your disk. Try the latest update and see how things work out then.

If you're noticing delays when you type or delete things you might want to think about turning off the grammar checker and check-as-you-type spellcheck. Every time you make a change these two features are going to have to do some processing, on a fast system with a lot of RAM you aren't likely to notice a speed hit, on an older slower machine without a lot of memory this is likely to be perceptible.
Even with Word 11.1.0 on a G5, with all of the spell checking, word counting and grammar checking turned off, it's still a slow application. Scrolling speed with my scrollwheel mouse is abysmal.
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
chadseld
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Jul 28, 2005, 11:36 AM
 
After many annoying days with Tiger, I can reproduce this problem on both of my Macs (G5 2x2.5, G4 1.33).

A few observations:
1. The slow-down is best seen while selecting text, un-selecting text, or scrolling a text view.
2. The slow-down is worst in java applications.
3. The slow-down is triggered by quitting a Java application.

I have seen this slow down in the following applications (I'm sure there are others affected):
Microsoft Word
Terminal
JEdit
NeoOffice/J
Eclipse (Java IDE)

Steps to reproduce:
1. Download a Java application (java applications are the trigger) such as JEdit www.jedit.org.
2. Drag MSWord to your dock. Drag JEdit to your dock.
3. Launch MSWord.
4. Open a document. Select text, un-select text, and scroll for a bit. This is NORMAL speed.
5. Launch JEdit from the dock.
6. Quit JEdit (with MSWord in the background)
7. Now you should be back in MSWord. Select text, un-select text, scroll. This is SLOW speed.

If you did not notice the slow down, repeat steps 5 and 6 until you do. If you still don't quite notice the difference, try using NeoOffice instead of MSWord -- the slow-down is more pronounced when you are using a Java application.

Another thing you can do to verify the slower performance is to have the Activity Monitor open. Watch the CPU usage graph, when you are not seeing the bug very little CPU will be used to scroll text. When you are seeing the bug, a LOT of CPU will be used to scroll text.

Can anyone else verify what I am seeing?
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pathogen
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Aug 9, 2005, 10:22 PM
 
I can verify.

I'm not running any Java apps and I've experienced severe slowdowns with Word 2004 v.11.1. Similarly, I've had problems with fonts disappearing in InDesign CS 2 (which doesn't have any Suitcase support - what I typically used in the past) that make me feel that there is more to it than just bloated software. Both apps rely on Tiger to manage fonts, albeit differently, and I'm betting dollars to donuts something is going on there with fonts. And no, I don't have too many, and I have 1.5gigs of Ram in my 2005 Dual 2.0 G5.

I'm going to start being more vocal about it soon, but I'm really feeling that Tiger is a dog for speed. Not since 10.1 have a felt so beholden to OS processes running and tying up my system. My dual 867 G4 with Panther felt faster with Office 2004 than my dual 2Ghz G5 under Tiger.
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tuqqer
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Aug 9, 2005, 10:51 PM
 
I concur. I'm using Office 2004, and Word 2004 (11.1 (0409210) has pauses in it that make it very frustrating. The main pauses are when applying formatting, scrolling down (up is fine), deleting, deleting forward, and applying Styles. I have a 2Ghz G5 with 2.5 gigs of Samsung original RAM. I installed Tiger from a zeroed drive, even reinstalling my User account. I started with a computer as if it came from the factory, then installed Office, and still these slowdowns. It's really no longer a program I enjoy using, or recommend to anyone any more, and I was using Word since 5.1. It's just a shameful piece of software.

I'm the author of a couple books, and write for a living, and if I could find another word processor that did Outline as well as Word, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I will ocassionally go through a few word processing apps that have been suggested, and there seems like many good ones out there, but none have an outline that I like as much as Word. Still, I'd switch the second I found one. I actually do a lot initial writing now in TextEdit.

Shame on Microsoft for doing this to Word.
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kilechki
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Aug 10, 2005, 07:41 AM
 
On my PB 12" 1.33, Word 2004 is undoubtly slower than it was with Panther. Opening, typing, even using the formatting palette have become somewhat "stickier". It has been so embarrassing to wait 20 or 30 seconds to open Word that I had to switch to Pages, which I am now happily using. It is really a great app, a little slow to open but its implementation of templates is really brilliant.
IIRC, however, MS had promised a service pack to improve Office on Tiger for the first half of 2005, like Messenger. And Messenger was delivered yesterday...
     
Todd Madson
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Aug 10, 2005, 04:04 PM
 
Can anyone quantifiably verify the issues are with Word?
-Is there a noticeable difference on a system configured with Panther vs. Tiger?

My point is, some are reporting that Tiger may have had faster user interface quality
but less overall reliability and program speed than Panther.

Would that be accurate?
     
smileLP  (op)
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Aug 10, 2005, 04:35 PM
 
i can't say super-definitively what's happening, but i only noticed 2 things after my tiger upgrade: 1) the internet seemed to be a tiny bit quicker, and 2) MS word got noticeably slower
     
chadseld
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Aug 10, 2005, 08:36 PM
 
Nothing's official yet, but this bug appears to be fixed in 10.4.3. Thank God.
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kcmac
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Aug 10, 2005, 09:33 PM
 
Originally Posted by chadseld
Nothing's official yet, but this bug appears to be fixed in 10.4.3. Thank God.
That would be good news. Word takes forever to open for me. I have 11.1 and am running Tiger dot 2.
     
smileLP  (op)
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Aug 10, 2005, 11:16 PM
 
good news re bug fix

do you mean the general slowness of word in tiger, or just the slow opening time will be fixed?

thanks
     
budster101
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Aug 10, 2005, 11:33 PM
 
Word suxxors. Get Pages.
     
kcmac
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Aug 11, 2005, 12:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by budster101
Word suxxors. Get Pages.
No doubt. Pages is great. But sometimes, ya gotstahaveword.
     
budster101
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Aug 11, 2005, 12:12 AM
 
For what again? Tell me you don't use Macros.... that shizzle is just a drizzle.
     
brettcamp
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Aug 11, 2005, 03:57 AM
 
Originally Posted by tuqqer
It's just a shameful piece of software.

I'm the author of a couple books, and write for a living, and if I could find another word processor that did Outline as well as Word, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I will ocassionally go through a few word processing apps that have been suggested, and there seems like many good ones out there, but none have an outline that I like as much as Word. Still, I'd switch the second I found one. I actually do a lot initial writing now in TextEdit.
Me, too, and I'm a professional writer as well. Have you tried Mellel? I like its outlining, which is actually superior to Word's, once you learn how to use it; it takes a while.
     
tuqqer
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Aug 11, 2005, 11:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by brettcamp
Me, too, and I'm a professional writer as well. Have you tried Mellel? I like its outlining, which is actually superior to Word's, once you learn how to use it; it takes a while.
Glad to hear from someone using Mellel, and went through the learning curve. I've downloaded it a couple times, but got stymied by exactly that, the learning curve. Its method of outlining will take me a bit to get my mind around it, but this is encouraging to hear from another happy user. I will check it out again! thanks for the post.
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chadseld
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Aug 11, 2005, 04:02 PM
 
Originally Posted by smileLP
good news re bug fix

do you mean the general slowness of word in tiger, or just the slow opening time will be fixed?

thanks
General Slowness.
If your computer stops responding for a long time, turn it off and then back on. - Microsoft
     
budster101
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Aug 11, 2005, 04:38 PM
 
Why do you think that's so?

Why do you think that Microsoft is stopping OpenGL support in Vista?... only ActiveX controls....
Microsoft sucks, that's why.

I hope you guys aren't expecting a new Media Player any time soon... or IE updates, so you can go to the United States Patent Office and other non W3C compliant web sites. Can't wait for IE 7.0... haha..not.

Get away from word.
Use Mellel, or any other of a number of fantastic packages. Screw M$
     
brettcamp
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Aug 11, 2005, 11:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by tuqqer
Glad to hear from someone using Mellel, and went through the learning curve. I've downloaded it a couple times, but got stymied by exactly that, the learning curve. Its method of outlining will take me a bit to get my mind around it, but this is encouraging to hear from another happy user. I will check it out again! thanks for the post.
You're welcome. The company has even recognized that the outlining learning curve is a too damn steep by recently posting on its site not one but TWO guides to Mellel outlining. I think they could make the outlining a lot more user friendly, but it really doesn't take that long to learn, and once you do learn it, it's very powerful, especially when working with long documents with lots of sections.

Actually, I've only flirted with Mellel, as so far I've found DevonNote to provide the outlining/structure I need, and TextEdit sufficient to do the rest. A lot of people use OmniOutliner in conjunction with a word processor.

But if I were buying a word processor (and I may need a one for my next book), it'd be Mellel. I have Word but rarely use it, for the reasons cited by others here and more.
     
LeeG
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Aug 12, 2005, 09:48 AM
 
There are some other threads on this topic as well, but I couldn't agree more - Word is DOG slow. Occasional beachballs, slow scrolling, and out and out freeze ups. I am stuck in word, as I LOVE Endnote and need its functionality. Some of what I witness is probably related to the endnote-integration with word, but I can't explain the frequent CPU spikes while using word. VERY disappointing.

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budster101
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Aug 12, 2005, 10:09 AM
 
Well every so often every Microsoft program has to phone home and report in...
     
outsourced
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Aug 12, 2005, 01:37 PM
 
Originally Posted by budster101
...
Microsoft sucks, that's why....
Get away from word.

...Screw M$
Screw 'em!
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