Slide Sorter: Mac vs Win Powerpoint

[jcwhitt]

I had hoped to be able to edit Powerpoint files on both
the Mac and PC.
The slidesorter redraws the screen wery rapidly in the
Windows version.

But, I've found that the Slidesorter redraws so slow in
the Mac version of Powerpoint that it is almost unusable
for me.

What a disappointment!

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Please post a follow-up message with the information of the version of
PowerPoint, MacOS, and what hardware (processor, RAM, video card) that
you have.

Thanks.

-Jim

 

[JPenSuisse]

Hello,

Me too. I'm running 10.3.5 (relatively new reinstallation of the
whole OS) with a 1.25GHz powerbook and the redraw for the slide sorter
view is so slow that I only use it in emergencies.

Otherwise, I notice this version of Powerpont is just overall even
slower than Powerpoint X. My ancient Wintel machine is clearly faster
with Powerpont 2000 in virtually every aspect. My only hypothesis has
been that the quality of the pictures is much better and this just
takes lots more computing power.

I am worried that this version is so slow that it could affect the
overall quality of my presentations.

Any comments from the experts?

Cheers, John

 

[Michael Grant]

You're not alone. Mac Powerpoint 2004 is slow. Period. I'm running on
a Dual G4 800mhz Quicksilver with 1gig of RAM. I have Apple's original
Nvidia card that shipped with that machine. I think its a Twinview MX.
Sure, its a 3 year old machine, but so is my Windows laptop and it
screams running PPT for Windows when compared to the Mac version. This
is not a machine specific issue. Its slow performance for Mac PPT,
period. Microsoft needs to optimize their code. Plain and simple.

Just for comparison, iPhoto scales and displays hundreds and thousands
of photos at much higher res than what is going on with PPT slides.
Its blazing fast on my machine.

-m

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

You are not the only one - back-to-back comparison of Powerpoint Vx and
Powerpoint 2004 on my 867 Powerbook 12" indicates 2004 slideshow view
takes twice as long to open, and similarly slow on redrawing after a
rescaling of the slides in the view.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

This must have something to do with the content of the slides. Yesterday
I put one picture onto each of 562 slides. When I scrolled the
slide-sorter view it was 100% responsive. No delay at all.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVP FAQ
<http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs>

 

[Michael Grant]

Jim,

That may be true, but that approach is probably what Microsoft QA used
when giving PPT 2004 the green light to ship. I would hardly call your
test of slide sorter performance 'real world'.

The reality is that slide sorter is broken for real world use of the
program. Slides that contain text AND graphics along with builds are
PAINFULLY slow to redraw. If MS offered the slide view in multi-pane
view, it might help a little as a work around, but as it stands, I
can't see how anyone can say that slide sorter is anything but a dog.

What you say may be true for VERY simple slides, but then how do you
explain that the Windows version screams at redrawing the very same
slides in sorter view. Its not the hardware because I'm running on a
LESS powered Windows laptop versus a Dual CPU Mac G4.

I used to think that people overstated MS's 'average' software
reputation. But as someone who has managed deskop software products in
the past, I can say that Microsoft really blew it by shipping PPT 2004
too early. This product is BETA all the way with the number of bugs
people are reporting and TERRIBLE app performance.

I hope they are working on optimizing and fixing as well speak because
I can't recommend PPT 2004 to anyone and won't until they fix these
problems. If the Windows version behaved like the current Mac version,
the trade rags and users would be in revolt.

-m

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Michael,

If you can get a sample presentation that exhibits the problem to Grace
Kwaft at Microsoft it might help. I think her email address is
(e-mail address removed).

You should send her an email asking if she would like to receive an
example presentation before actually sending one to her.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVP FAQ
<http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs>

 

[Michael Grant]

Thanks Jim. I'll do that. But the presentations I have are
confidential to the technology company(s) and they would die if these
were sent to Microsoft of all companies.

Part of what might be going on here is the comparison of Mac vs
Windows performance. Pure and simple the Windows version of PPT blows
away the latest Mac version. I hate to say that because I know the
MacBU folks worked hard on it and we do appreciate their efforts. If
all you know is the Mac version then perhaps you are used to this slow
performance. I didn't use Office X so I can't compare. But in going
from Windows PPT 2003 to PPT Mac 2004 the performance difference is a
killer

So, if anyone in the MacBU is reading this, please focus in a making
the Mac version an EQUAL to the Windows version on both features AND
performance.

-m

 

[walterrask]

It's been months since the last post, but Microsoft Tech Assistance is
still blissfully unaware of the problems with SLOW PPT2004. They've
had me delete preferences, reinstall Office 2004, create a new identify
(user name) and reinstall Office 2004. No change. A presentation I
created in PPT X takes 5-7 seconds to display a 20-slide Slide Sort
View in PPT X, but 32 to 51 seconds in PPT 2004. Note that this is
the identical presentation on the identical PowerBook.

This has nothing to do with Windows vs. Mac. Office X (including PPT
X) worked fine. Office 2004 is a DOG. In addition to PPT, I've have
such interesting experiences as:
Entourage scrambling and deleting addresses, Excel not displaying text
in (Page Setup) Header/Footer, Excel printing differently from Page
Layout view and Print Preview (what ever happened to WYSIWYG?), and
slow Word.

 

[hivekz]

Dear Jim,

Powerpoint 2003 running on Virtual PC is much faster in slide sorter
and slide redraws than the native Mac 2004 version! This is simply
unacceptable! I hope MS will speed it up by 3x-5x! With this speedup
the Windows version will still be 2-4x faster than on a comparable PC,
but this is OK.

Zoltan

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Zoltan,

One of the things that Apple has done to speed things up in Mac OSX is
to turn over graphics processing to the video graphics card.

Have you installed a graphics card that MacOS can use? I find that on my
machine that the slide sorter view works very quickly.

-Jim

 

[Benjamin Amsaleg]

Hi Zoltan,

One of the things that Apple has done to speed things up in Mac OSX is
to turn over graphics processing to the video graphics card.

Have you installed a graphics card that MacOS can use? I find that on my
machine that the slide sorter view works very quickly.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVP FAQ
<http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs>

Jim,

I confirms what Zoltan is saying using a PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz with 1Gig of
RAM, 128 Meg of VRAM and high speed HD...
This is of course very true when you allow to show formatting is this view.

BAM

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

One of the things that Apple has done to speed things up in Mac OSX is

to turn over graphics processing to the video graphics card.

Oh dear. Windows did that some while back and what *fun* we've had ever since.

Win has a very handy technique for troubleshooting video board/driver problems:
you can set hardware acceleration back (which doesn't really do anything to the
hardware, it tells Windows to take back ever more of the graphics functions in
the even that the video board/driver don't do it right).

Is there anything similar for OSX? Could be quite useful for diagnosing this
sort of problem if so.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Benjamin Amsaleg]

Oh dear. Windows did that some while back and what *fun* we've had ever
since.

Win has a very handy technique for troubleshooting video board/driver
problems:
you can set hardware acceleration back (which doesn't really do anything to
the
hardware, it tells Windows to take back ever more of the graphics functions in
the even that the video board/driver don't do it right).

Is there anything similar for OSX? Could be quite useful for diagnosing this
sort of problem if so.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

Yes. The developper tools included some utilities allowing you to turn off
such things. Quartz Debug is one of them

BAM

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Yes. The developper tools included some utilities allowing you to turn off
such things. Quartz Debug is one of them

I wonder if I have an old version ( 1.1 v8 )

It has a tool that lists windows and another that flashes any window that's
updated in various ways, but I don't see anything that tells the OS to take over
drawing functions that'd normally be handed off to the video card and its driver.

OpenGLInfo suggests that there's both a Generic (Apple) and an ATI driver on my
iBook. I wonder if it's possible to switch between them? In effect, that would
be the equivalent of kicking Windows' HA slider all the way down to zero; could
be a very useful diagnostic.

BAM

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[hivekz]

Hi Jim,

I run Office 2004 on a new iMac G5, so this can not be a proble. Also
Virtual PC was running on the very same machine, and did much faster
redraws on the very same machine. RAM is 1Gig. I really hope that
MS+Apple will check these performance issues, especially that those are
related to only the latest version.

Zoltan

 

[mgsite]

An update for all involved...

I went to Macworld this last January and found one of the Office Mac
engineers at the Microsoft booth. I explained how painful it was for us
Powerpoint users who had to deal with the SLOW slide sorter redraw
problems. Among the things he said was:

- Yea, we know about that and it has to do with the fact that in PPT
2004 we shifted from using Quartz to using OpenGL per Apple's
guidelines moving forward. So screen drawing performance is now tied
more to the graphics card you have and how OpenGL is supported. So if
you have an older machine with an older graphics card, you might see
slower performance.

I asked him 'why can't you guys just cache the slides that haven't
changed?' I mean c'mon, if the slide hasn't changed you don't need to
redraw it now do you? Why make us wait for 30-60 slides to redraw in
sorter if they haven't changed. He replied that they were looking at
doing just that but hadn't got around to it.

I also explain that a 3 year old Dell laptop positively screams at
slide sorting comparied with the same age Mac. He said I should try the
same presentation on a newer machine with a better graphics card. This
might explain why some see this problem and others apparently don't.

I'm going to take my presentation into an Apple store on a iPOD Shuffle
and copy it to a powermac G5 and a Powerbook w/ 128mg of VRAM. I want
to see the difference to believe what he is telling me. But regardless,
the MacBU ought to really get on doing the following to PPT 2004:

- Fix the performance issues
- Get rid of poor screen updates when editing text
- ADD MOTION PATH EDITING!!!
- Save as SWF (Flash) please !!!!! This is needed for many web
presentation systems. .mov is not good enough.
- Slide preview tab in multipane view right next to Outline View.
- Easy way to launch full screen QT movie from slide and then return to
the slide presentation mid-stream.
- Option to auto convert all drag and drop images to PPT metafiles.
This will eliminate the cross platform issue of moving a mac file to
Windows only to find that you get those funky broken QT link icons for
'missing graphic'.
- Links to iLife content

If the MacBU can get those done then they'll really have redeemed
themselves. And by the way, how about adding Events to Entourage like
what's in Outlook 2003?

-m

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

- Option to auto convert all drag and drop images to PPT metafiles.

This will eliminate the cross platform issue of moving a mac file to
Windows only to find that you get those funky broken QT link icons for
'missing graphic'.

As a workaround, have you tried ungrouping then immediately regrouping these
graphics? That should essentially do what you're after.

If so, this'll do it for each OLEobject, picture and group in the presentation
automatically:

Sub UngroupRegroup()
' Ungroups/Groups

Dim oSh As Shape
Dim oSl As Slide

For Each oSl In ActivePresentation.Slides
For Each oSh In oSl.Shapes
Debug.Print oSh.Name
Select Case oSh.Type
' add other types as needed
Case Is = msoEmbeddedOLEObject, msoPicture, msoGroup
With oSh.Ungroup
.Group
End With
Case Else
' do nothing
End Select
Next ' shape
Next ' Slide
End Sub



================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================