All 1 entries tagged Universal

Mac: Office 2008 is RUBBISH SLOW.

Mac: Office 2004 ran slow on new mac’s as it was coded for older mac’s Power PC architecture, therefore had to run through Apple’s Rosetta dynamic translator in order to function on the new Intel chipsets being used from 2006. Fair enough you might think, its old software.

While every other software house were adapting their applications to run as “Universal Binary”, allowing them to run native on both platforms, MS were probably folding their arms and whistling saying….nah we can’t be bothered to waste time doing that, we’ll just make the next version UB and that will keep everyone happy.

Okay so everyone with an Intel Mac has put up with Office running sluggish for the last year and a half or so waiting for this great new update which would finally do the platform justice.

WRONG. How very wrong. I can’t understand how it is possible for Mac: Office 2008 to run SLOWER as a native Intel application than as a PPC app running through emulation.

Only Microsoft could put out such a bloated, slow, piece of rubbish as this. Has it even been through bug testing or did it just get slapped on a disk with a cursory glance?

Problems?

Loves crashing even on the most simplest of tasks. (I swear it has a sensor so that it crashes just before an auto save so you lose the most amount of work)

Takes about a minute to boot PowerPoint from a cold start. A minute?! This is a freaking productivity app!! I could have started Final Cut and be well into capturing video by the time this rubbish opens.

What’s up with the elements gallery? Make your mind up, is it the Ribbon or not? At least let me friggin get rid of it.

Generally very sluggish. This isn’t 5 year old hardware. It’s a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro with 2Gb of Ram and 128 of VRAM. A word processor shouldn’t be this bloated!

I know its not just me either, people all over the world are having exactly the same problems with it.

And yet…...I still use it despite cursing every time it crashes and keep coming back to it. Why? Because there is no realistic alternative. I’m sure the freeware brigade will promote NeoOffice or the Apple elite, Pages, but for word processing in a University environment, Word is really the only way to go.

Its also got some nice features. Smart Art is the best thing Apple never did. Whoever came up with that should be given a cookie, honestly its amazing! Just stop the damn thing crashing!

So alas, Microsoft is this REALLY the best effort you can do with 4 years of development? Really? Oh dear.

: 04 Mar 2008 18:15 |  Tags: Binary Exec Mac Microsoft Office Powerpoint Rosetta Universal Word |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem