[OreoCookie]

Ok, my girlfriend is a switcher and very unhappy with the performance of Word X on her new iBook 800 with 640 megs of RAM.

I didn't install any additional fonts or anything.
She complains that Word takes two to four seconds to update when she is typing or hitting return.

As she is my girlfriend and a switcher, I got two important reasons to make her happy.

BTW, I don't work with Word except to open occasional attachments. I am more a Unix type of guy since I write letters with TeX

[Colonel Panic]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Ok, my girlfriend is a switcher and very unhappy with the performance of Word X on her new iBook 800 with 640 megs of RAM.

I didn't install any additional fonts or anything.
She complains that Word takes two to four seconds to update when she is typing or hitting return.

As she is my girlfriend and a switcher, I got two important reasons to make her happy.

BTW, I don't work with Word except to open occasional attachments. I am more a Unix type of guy since I write letters with TeX

Word v.X IS slow, but not 2-4 seconds slow. something is definitely wrong. try repairing permissions and turn off live word count, which is a dog.

[galarneau]

Check out my reply from this thread (towards the bottom)

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=131179

-------------------------------

Sorry to dig up this old thread, but here's a little tip for those of you with PowerBooks (or iBooks) who are annoyed with how slow Office X is:

In the General Preferences, uncheck the "provide feedback with sound" option.

On my iBook, I was having a horrible time using Excel. Every time I copied, pasted, saved, dragged, etc, I was getting the spinning beachball and a 1-2 second pause.

It turns out that *books will shut down the sound circuitry to save battery life (I was running on battery... no problem when plugged in). Every time Excel wanted to play a sound (often!), it had to fire the sound circuitry back up, hence the pause.

I can only assume that the original poster, who was taking notes in class, was running on battery power and did not have any other audio using apps running (like iTunes), which would have kept the sound circuitry going.

Your milage may vary... it worked well for me, and made Excel alot less annoying when running on battery.

-------------------------------

So, is your girlfriend using the battery a lot... is this when the slowdown happens? Is it slow when she's running on AC power?

[CheesePuff]

Yup - I have a PowerBook G4 and I turned off provide feedback with sound in Word (which then turns it off in all other Office v.X applications, I believe) and now its normal speed.

[The Evener]

Be sure to stress to your girlfriend that any shortcomings on Word stem from Microsoft and not Apple. I can understand wanting to get Word running as smooth as possible, but it helps to make it clear that it's not because Apple is "inferior" that Word isn't more responsive. Assure her that the next version of Word will address some of these shortcomings.

This might be a silly question, but did you apply the latest Service Release from MS? I'm guessing they rolled the "latest" vesion of Office into their CDs, but maybe you have a copy of Word that is 10.0.0 instead of 10.1.1. (?)

If you do apply the update, double-check to make sure preferences like "live word count" are still deactiviated.

I also find Word is more responsive when I'm running with only a few programs, and no iTunes. Both programs seem to like fighting over processor cycles with each other, and giving reign to only one or the other helps. I do use iTunes and Word on occasion, but I do notice the odd lag when this is the case. Then again, I only have a clamshell iBook (300 MHz) so these "problems" most likely do not appear on the more recent iBooks.

[OreoCookie]

Well, I am anxiously awaiting an Apple Office Suite (as I have purchased Keynote already -- excellent considering it's a 1.0 release).

But till then, I will have to tweak Office v. X a bit so it runs smoothly. BTW, I don't want to start it, because it takes about 90 seconds to read all my fonts and ?optimize the font menu'.

[OreoCookie]

Thanx for the link, I will look into it.

[Simon]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Well, I am anxiously awaiting an Apple Office Suite (as I have purchased Keynote already -- excellent considering it's a 1.0 release).

But till then, I will have to tweak Office v. X a bit so it runs smoothly. BTW, I don't want to start it, because it takes about 90 seconds to read all my fonts and ?optimize the font menu'.

I'm waiting for Apple's Office anxiously too.

For the time being, have you thought about OpenOffice? It might not give you the same troubles as MS Office and it's 100% free. I don't know how it works on a Mac, but I use it daily on my Linux box at work - I think it's about as close to Office as you can get.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by Simon:
I'm waiting for Apple's Office anxiously too.

For the time being, have you thought about OpenOffice? It might not give you the same troubles as MS Office and it's 100% free. I don't know how it works on a Mac, but I use it daily on my Linux box at work - I think it's about as close to Office as you can get.

She used to use OpenOffice on her PC, but wasn't happy with it.

I use TeX which is 100 % free, too.

[Simon]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
I use TeX which is 100 % free, too.

Ah, me too. Funny, I've been trying to advertize LaTeX on these boards a couple of times, but I don't see many people here who actually use it. Do you use TeXShop?

Doesn't your g/f like TeX?

[siluni]

Also turn off "check spelling (and grammar) while typing" and just do your spell check manually. Makes a big difference. I'm running Word X on an iBook 700 with 640MB RAM and it's mighty fine.

[xtal]

Originally posted by Simon:
Ah, me too. Funny, I've been trying to advertize LaTeX on these boards a couple of times, but I don't see many people here who actually use it. Do you use TeXShop?

Doesn't your g/f like TeX?

As a result of your mentioning LaTeX in another thread, I have installed it (with TeXShop) and started using it. I like it, although I'm not very proficient with it yet, but I'll find my way around I suppose.

Consider this as another endorsement for this powerful (and free) program.

Don't worry, your persuasive powers haven't dwindled yet.

[Simon]

Originally posted by xtal:
Don't worry, your persuasive powers haven't dwindled yet.

I hope you're enjoying TeX. The learning curve may be a bit steep sometimes, but the results are very rewarding.

[xtal]

Originally posted by Simon:
I hope you're enjoying TeX. The learning curve may be a bit steep sometimes, but the results are very rewarding.

I am indeed. I was always a fan of markup languages, and working from the source directly. Programs like Dreamweaver always put a bad taste in my mouth.

Like I said, I'm not exactly a LaTeX whiz or anything, and I find myself referring to documentation quite often, but I'm amazed at the power of the program. I also like the fact that it outputs to PDF. Very nice indeed.

[OAW]

I use MS Word quite often on my iBook 700 at work so I thought I'd chime in ...

I just recently put together a 97 page document in Word, and I was have the exact same problem with constant beachballs and 2-4 second delays before typed letters appeared on the screen. After turning off the live word count showed no effect, I simply put up with it for an hour of so. I then began to wonder why Word on OS X was such a dog compared to Word XP ... so I used MS Remote Desktop Client to get into my PC and opened up the document in Word XP. To my surprise, I found that I had the same performance problems in Word XP! This indicated to me that the problem was the document and not the program itself. I figured that the document file had been corrupted somehow, so I simply created a new empty document, copied the contents of the document I was working on into it, and saved it in a new file (not a Save As because this will just re-save the corruption). After spending a little while getting headers/footers and margins the way I wanted them again I was back in business. Word on OS X and XP were back to normal "snappy" performance. I was able to finish my document without any further performance problems.

In summary, you might have a corrupted file. Copy the contents from that file into a new one and see if that fixes things for you.

OAW

[car1son]

See if the iBook Sound Problem applies.

You'll also see delays if you have the Energy Saver spin down the hard disk, since Word is a big program and likes to access lots of stuff on the disk.

There are things you can do with Word's Preferences to reduce the annoyance.
If you don't need a function, disable things like Background Pagination, Check Spelling as you type, Check Grammar as you type, Live Word Count (in status bar), Autocompletion, and Autocorrection.

[OreoCookie]

I love it. I can type fluently in my math lectures with TeX! But now, instead of thinking of a square root, I immediately think \sqrt{ ... }

[Simon]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
I love it. I can type fluently in my math lectures with TeX! But now, instead of thinking of a square root, I immediately think \sqrt{ ... }

As long as you don't start writing emails with a

Code:
\documentclass{e-mail}
\begin{document}

eveything is fine.

Actually, thanks to TeX e-mails get easier to understand. If you want to discuss a mathematical problem over e-mail it's a royal pain with stuff like integral from bla to bla of f(x^(1/2))dx. It gets much easier if you just use TeX notation. Once you get used to writing TeX you can read it quite well too.

Are we getting OT here? Probably. To get back OnT: I recently discovered the class {scrletter} which allows me to write very nice business letters in LaTeX. Another reason not to use Office.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by Simon:
As long as you don't start writing emails with a

Code:
\documentclass{e-mail}
\begin{document}

eveything is fine.

Actually, thanks to TeX e-mails get easier to understand. If you want to discuss a mathematical problem over e-mail it's a royal pain with stuff like integral from bla to bla of f(x^(1/2))dx. It gets much easier if you just use TeX notation. Once you get used to writing TeX you can read it quite well too.

Are we getting OT here? Probably. To get back OnT: I recently discovered the class {scrletter} which allows me to write very nice business letters in LaTeX. Another reason not to use Office.

Bingo. A girl that used to sit next to me in Fourier- and Laplace Transformations copied stuff off my TeX source file. Impressive (for a girl ).