Just how slow the Microsoft Office 2008 is
Fri, 21 March 2008
After abandoning the slow Office 2004 in favour of Apple’s iWork, I could hardly wait to get my hands on Office 2008. But the new Office performance is not where I have imagined it would be. It is slow, very very slow to lanch, and during the normal operation it feels somewhat faster than its predecessor, but not by any respectable margin.
I decided to run some tests just to see how fast does the new Office launch, and compared it to Apple’s own iWork.
The computer used for testing is a MacBook Pro with 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 2GB RAM. OK, it’s not the fastest rocket in the universe, but I guess it sits nicely somewhere in the middle between the latest C2Ds, and G4s and G5s, plenty of which are still out there.
I firstly timed the cold start; reboot the computer, wait for 2 minutes to make sure any background processes have finished and start the Word 2008. Then I closed the application (Cmd-Q) and reload it again several times. The time was measured from the moment I click the Dock icon to the moment the first character (u) is displayed in the application (I key in uuu as soon as the application opens on the screen).
I have repeated this 4 times and the figures below are the averages, however the results of individual measurements are very close.
The next step was doing the same four times with Excel 2008, four times with Pages and finally with Numbers.
Then I updated the Office to version 12.0.1 to see if there is any difference. Of course there is, just not what I expected. Repeated the test, rebooting four times for Word and for Excel, the cold start is much much slower, but the reload is a little faster.
| Application | Before the update | After the update | ||
| Cold | Reload | Cold | Reload | |
| MS Word 2008 | 37.6 | 10.9 | 45.9 | 7.9 |
| MS Excel 2008 | 26.1 | 4.6 | 38.1 | 4.2 |
| Apple Pages | 10.8 | 2.4 | ||
| Apple Numbers | 10.4 | 2.3 | ||
I read a tip somewhere that you can speed up the launch of MS Word by disabling WYSIWYG fonts in Word preferences, and this is true. It reduced the launch time for about 7 seconds, but only the cold start, reload is of course unaffected. All tests were done with the WYSIWYG fonts turned off.
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MacGoog said: Sat, 22 March 2008 at 01:14
Word 2004 takes 35 seconds to open on my 1.67ghz G4 and about 6 seconds to reload. This includes pressing the enter key in the project gallery.
Maybe a new MS philosophy…. make things run slower.
Paul H said: Sat, 22 March 2008 at 01:30
I agree Office 08 is slow, but I’m going to accept it as I have currently taken an entire day to write a paragraph of my essay, and I can now use the slow loading as an excuse. Thanks :)
Lisa Melnick said: Sat, 22 March 2008 at 02:44
Hey Mike,
I haven’t played around with office 2008 much. i’ve have it on my machine and use it sometimes. As a former windows user, I can tell you that office 2007 on windows is slow too. That is just microsoft for ya.
Now that I am a mac girl, I just try to do everything mac and am loving it. Just got a macbook too!
I like pages, too. The fact that pages opens up word docs and lets you save items as doc files is great. Really no need for office, I suppose, but I have it anyway.
There are some things one will do that the other doesn’t.
Christopher Vigliotti said: Sat, 22 March 2008 at 02:46
*cough* neo office *cough* free *cough*
maxintech said: Sat, 22 March 2008 at 04:19
It’s right. Office still slow. But, when I open a 89Mb Word 2003 Document, with a tons of embedded graphics, Word 2008 is twice or three times more faster to open this document than Pages ‘08 . In addition, Pages isn’t 100% compatible with Word documents. I work with many Word documents from my clients that Pages can’t render pretty well.
I like Pages, but, I still need the slow, annoying and expensive Word.
8*(
Joshua said: Wed, 2 April 2008 at 05:28
Wow.. I just ordered Office 2008. I am currently running Office 2007 in XP Pro in Parallels and the launch time for Word and Excel is almost negligible. I was hoping that I would be able to stop using virtualization when 2K8 arrived.