[jderosa3]

I have an iMac G5 with 2.5GB RAM and Leopard 10.5.2 installed.

All of the office 2008 applications literally take 2-3 minutes to open. I can't understand why. I was told that Suitcase fusion could be the culprit, but I tried quitting the app before I launched anything and it didn't help anything.

Any ideas? Anyone else experiencing this? Thanks for any insight.

[eggman]

It may not be Suitcase fusion, per se... it may be the number of fonts enabled on your system (and these can be high even if Suitcase isn't running at the time).

I also experience Office 2008 apps taking a long time to boot, and I do typically have a large number of fonts enabled at any given time. It would be interesting to pare them down and see if Office apps start faster. I know that in the past an "optimizing font menu" messages would occasionally appear when launching Word 2004... and that could take a while to complete.

[jderosa3]

i have a ton of fonts in suitcase, but they are not perminately activated. They deactivate on restart the only fonts "installed" on the system are those that came with leopard and office 2008.

Im sort of stumped here.

[JKT]

It wouldn't be beyond MS to be doing something ****ing stupid - they are probably ignoring the status of the fonts and loading them all, regardless of whether or not they are disabled in Suitcase. What happens if you use Font Book to disable them instead?

[timmerk]

Office 2008 takes forever to start regardless of Sutcase being installed or not. 2004 under emulation starts faster on Intel Macs than the "native" Office 2008.

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by timmerk 

Office 2008 takes forever to start regardless of Sutcase being installed or not. 2004 under emulation starts faster on Intel Macs than the "native" Office 2008.

Cold starts are about the same for me. 7-10 seconds. 2009 warm starts are faster on my MBP C2D.

As always, YMMV.

[besson3c]

There *has* to be some bugs here. I only have 200 fonts on my machine at work and it takes forever to start up there too. Hell, I bet that Word 5.1 on an old Quadra starts up faster than 2008 for me... Great progress here, huh?

Why is it that something as simple as an f-ing word processor is so hard to get right? Really, the only thing that Word and Excel has going for it (aside from the occasional advanced feature that very few people use) is its file format. I'm glad I don't have to pay for a MS Office license simply so that I can use their stupid file format.

[Sherman Homan]

So true! Nothing was better, faster, more stable than Word 5 on an 040 Mac.
iTunes sucked... but hey!

[TheoCryst]

I keep getting this nagging suspicion that something went horribly wrong during the development of Office 2008. Evidence:

- There was a management change a few months before the release date
- Poor support for such simple things as Exposé in Word, other niggling little bugs
- Slow even on crazy-powerful machines
- Very few features from Office 2007 incorporated
- Loss of VBA

As a developer, this seems very representative of a project that suffered some massive setbacks at one stage or another during development, and what we see are what they were able to salvage.

I've met a few of the engineers at the MacBU in Redmond, and they're all highly intelligent, competent individuals who seem to genuinely care about Mac software. I doubt the problem lies with them...

[Colonel Panic]

Originally Posted by TheoCryst 

I keep getting this nagging suspicion that something went horribly wrong during the development of Office 2008. Evidence:

- There was a management change a few months before the release date
- Poor support for such simple things as Exposé in Word, other niggling little bugs
- Slow even on crazy-powerful machines
- Very few features from Office 2007 incorporated
- Loss of VBA

As a developer, this seems very representative of a project that suffered some massive setbacks at one stage or another during development, and what we see are what they were able to salvage.

I've met a few of the engineers at the MacBU in Redmond, and they're all highly intelligent, competent individuals who seem to genuinely care about Mac software. I doubt the problem lies with them...

Wasn't it also delayed several months from the original ETA?

I like office 08 on intel machines, but Excel in particular seems "unfinished". I understand, for example, that the Solver was dependent on VBA, but was this not the type of thing that could have been readily coded afresh for Excel 08 to prevent key functionality from disappearing?

[Cadaver]

There is little motivation for Microsoft to produce anything more than a barely functional version of Microsoft Office for Mac.

[0157988944]

That's not really a good argument. The MacBU division all use Macs and they develop exclusively for Macs. So it's not like they paid more attention to Windows Office, because they are solely focused on Mac Office. And Microsoft as a company I hop isn't stupid enough to tell Mac BU to put out a throttled version of Office. Office for Mac is probably one of Microsoft's best products.

[Cadaver]

The MacBU can only do what corporate allows them to do. Who knows if they have access to the Windows Office source code. Who knows how many features were axed by the higher-ups.
Personally, I have little faith.

[TheoCryst]

Originally Posted by Cadaver 

The MacBU can only do what corporate allows them to do. Who knows if they have access to the Windows Office source code. Who knows how many features were axed by the higher-ups.
Personally, I have little faith.

From what I can tell, the biggest problem facing the MacBU is manpower available. I doubt I can divulge the exact number of people on the team, but my jaw dropped when I heard how few there were. There's only so much that a small team can do with limited time and resources.

[mindwaves]

Word 2008 takes an unacceptable 4-5 seconds (just guessing, seems longer) to start on my iMac C2D.

[64stang06]

Originally Posted by mindwaves 

Word 2008 takes an unacceptable 4-5 seconds (just guessing, seems longer) to start on my iMac C2D.

Mine is an unbearable 6-7 seconds.

[pcryan5]

Office about 10 seconds
User - considerably longer

[timmerk]

Word: 25-33 seconds cold launch for me on Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro w/ 2 GB RAM. No old copies of Office on my Mac.

[rickey939]

Cold launch takes awhile, but after it's opened once, it opens considerably faster for me on all of my Macs.

[driven]

Don't fret too much. Office 2007 on the PC is pretty horrid as well. (Especially the REALLY slow version of Outlook 2007.) I had to roll back to Office 2003 on the PC. (To be fair, I rolled back to Outlook 2003 and switched to OpenOffice for the rest.) <-- At least the UI isn't radically different like Office 2007.

I haven't tried Office 2008 on the Mac yet.

[Cadaver]

To be honest, while Office 2007 is a radical change in interface design from anything that currently exists, it at least is stable and quick, and has nice features such as live previews of font/style changes, etc. Can't speak to Outlook 2007, but Word/PowerPoint/Excel are quite nice.

[driven]

Originally Posted by Cadaver 

To be honest, while Office 2007 is a radical change in interface design from anything that currently exists, it at least is stable and quick, and has nice features such as live previews of font/style changes, etc. Can't speak to Outlook 2007, but Word/PowerPoint/Excel are quite nice.

It would be nice if I didn't have to relearn how to use it. (I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts that no longer exist.) It was an easier migration to OpenOffice.

Outlook 2007 is glacial. (Unfortunate). Also: Some genius had the bright idea to add my flagged e-mails to the task list ... essentially rendering the task list useless.

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by driven 

Also: Some genius had the bright idea to add my flagged e-mails to the task list ... essentially rendering the task list useless.

Interesting. This also happens in Entourage 2008, but only if you click over to Tasks, then choose To Do List (right under Tasks in the sidebar).

[bbales]

I read something on macfixit.com yesterday that indicated some users (with 10.5.2 installed) are experiencing start-ups of several MINUTES. Apparently both apple and microsoft are aware of the situation.

But it's one of the reasons why I just did the Leopard install, and not the update, too.

[bjojade]

When office opens, it creates a font cache file. If you had suitcase running once, Office will take ALL the open fonts you ever had and log them in the cache file. Turning off suitcase doesn't remove the fonts from Microsoft's memory, thus you still will have slow launch times.

Try creating a new user account on your machine and make sure that Suitcase isn't running. Then see if Word opens any faster. If it does, then the problem lies in the office preferences on your user account. Clear the preferences and you should be good to go.

[JKT]

So I was right then... MS are doing something ****ing stupid and loading all fonts regardless of whether they are off or not in suitcase. Why am I not remotely surprised?