Why is Word v.X slower than Word 98?

[Johnnie W.]

Word v.X works much more slowly on a new I-mac G4 than does
Word 98. Scrolling is very slow and text lags behind the
input of the keyboarder.
Is there something wrong with the program?

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Johnnie,

First, Word X *is* slower than Word 98 or Word 2001. It seems to be a fact
of (at least pre-G5) life. There are ways to speed things up however.

Make sure you have Office fully updated. You need the 10.1.2, 10.1.4 and
10.1.5 updaters (from the download page at mactopia.com).

Then repair disk permissions: Go to Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities.
Open up Disk Utility. Select your hard disk, then click the First Aid tab.
Click the button to "Repair Disk Permissions".

Other things to consider:

1) Work in Normal View as much as you can. This is a power-saving mode and
makes things a lot quicker.

2) Turn OFF the settings in Tools>Autocorrect that you don't need. Most of
them create more troubles than they cure anyway.

3) Give careful consideration to your Preferences>Save>AutoRecovery Save
interval. The shorter the interval, the more frequently you will be
interrupted: the longer the interval, the more data you stand to lose if you
get a crash. The default setting is probably best.

4) Turn Preferences>Save>"Allow Fast Saves" OFF and "Always make backup"
ON. Fast Saves causes documents to corrupt on modern file systems.

5) Turn off Automatic Spelling and Grammar and Word Count if you are not
using them. Dynamic Word Count is rather hungry and particularly useless
unless you are a lawyer filing court papers.

Also, there are certain add-ins which can slow Word down. Check the Office>
Startup Items> Word folder. If you see the Acrobat plug-in PDFMaker, get
rid of it. You don't need it with Word's built-in ability to save as PDF.

Hope something here helps.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Johnnie:

No, but there's something wrong with the OS

Word X is actually largely the same code as Word 98. However, in Word 98,
you are dealing with an application compiled for a co-operatively
multi-tasking operating system, In Word X, the same code is running in a
pre-emptively mutlitasking system.

In fact, they put some serious effort into making some of the routines in
Word X more efficient than the equivalents in Word 98. There's always ways
to make a program run more efficiently, and companies will usually do this
work as and when they have the opportunity to open a particular module of
the code to add or change features.

Leaving out all the technical stuff, under a co-operative multitasking
model, an application that requests time in the processor can decide when it
is ready to allow other programs to have a go. Under the pre-emptive model,
the system decides when everyone has had their share.

So if you run the exact same program under both OSs on the same Mac, the OS
X version will always seem slower. Earlier versions of OS X had a lot of
room for improvement in how they allocated time. OS 10.3 makes a big
difference: the system tuning and prioritization and time slicing has been
improved a lot.

What is actually happening is that any application (including Word...) is no
longer allowed to slow the whole system down to make itself look fast!

The answer is to do some hardware upgrades. I can tell you that Word X
approaches PC Word speeds if you run it with massive amounts of fast memory
in the Mac. I use 1GB of real memory: Word runs quite nicely in that
amount. Hard disk speed is also important to making Word move along: Word
is relatively disk-intensive, so if the disk is slow or full or badly
fragmented, Word will slow down dramatically. Often you get better results
running word with the files on the network.

Hope this helps

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Sat, 10 Jan 2004

 

[M. Katz]

All of this talk about pre-emptive multitasking and upgrading hardware
is a total red herring in my opinion and distracts from the FACT that
Word is simply poorly written. Try to deny it. There's no point. Blame
the victims.

All it takes is a little time with some *other* Mac OS X programs to
see that in terms of screen updates, graphcs, text, long documents,
and actual complex effects, Word's screendrawing text rendering is
just total cr*p. Look at how the apparent spacing between words
changes as you change the view magnification. Scroll through a long
document and watch it sputter and gasp to keep up. Other programs
don't have this problem. It's Word. It's not the OS. Anyone can write
bad software, and it's not the fault of OS X.

Case in point? Well how about Safari? Imagine the rich and complex
task of rendering text, graphics, styles, etc. And even on my poky G3
iBook, it scrolls like butter. Even the humble TextEdit can open .doc
files in Panther. It's not a solution, but watch how it handles long
text documents smoothly.

Word is using its own text-rendering and graphics engines rather than
the native OS X and it's paying a high price. Rather, we're paying a
high price because in corporate USA, we're all forced to use it.

Microsoft is not a software company: they are a marketing company. And
they're marketing garbage, and I'm upset about it. And they don't
care.

No, but there's something wrong with the OS

If you're answer is to blame the OS and tell the poor user to buy
massive amount of new hardware, I'd say it's much _cheaper_ to trash
Word and use a different program. It would be best if Microsoft simply
cared a little and wrote a better program with those $56 Billion they
have in cash. It's not that I hate them; I think they hate us. They
treat us that way.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

I don't have to. Word works at around 800 pages per second (on adequate
hardware...). Can you?

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 17 Jan 2004 11:25:16
-0800, (e-mail address removed) (M. Katz):

All it takes is a little time with some *other* Mac OS X programs to
see that in terms of screen updates, graphcs, text, long documents,
and actual complex effects, Word's screendrawing text rendering is
just total cr*p.

Spend a little time in the source code. All of that is being done by APPLE
code Word does NOT draw its own display! None of what you see on
screen from Word is drawn by Word - it's all produced using CarbonLib calls.

Look at how the apparent spacing between words
changes as you change the view magnification.

The PC version has a function that correct almost all of that: they
throttled it back on the Mac to gain a bit more speed.

Scroll through a long
document and watch it sputter and gasp to keep up.

Have a look in Top: Word is waiting for the CPU or waiting for the Disk, or
both. Can't blame Word if OS X doesn't answer the phone...

Other programs don't have this problem.

Other programs are not trying to do as much work as Word is. Rendering
ASCII at 72 dpi is trivial compared to rendering post-script outlines with a
resolution of one twentieth of a point in Unicode using OTF fonts.

Case in point? Well how about Safari? Imagine the rich and complex
task of rendering text, graphics, styles, etc. And even on my poky G3
iBook, it scrolls like butter. Even the humble TextEdit can open .doc
files in Panther. It's not a solution, but watch how it handles long
text documents smoothly.

Safari has a far simpler task than Word: anything is easy when you can throw
away any part of the file that is not visible. When you have to hold the
entire file integrated in case the user makes an editing change, all of a
sudden you have a problem several orders of magnitude larger.

TextEdit can scroll smoothly because it is rendering in, well, text! It
simply doesn't have as much to do. Of course, it is not hurt by the fact
that Apple was able to tune the OS to make TextEdit look good!

Word is using its own text-rendering and graphics engines rather than
the native OS X and it's paying a high price.

Really? The Word developers WILL be surprised. There must be several
hundred megabytes of code in a LinkLib somewhere they never knew existed
(Word does use graphics import filters, and it does use text import filters,
but all of the rendering is done with Apple code).

Microsoft is not a software company: they are a marketing company. And
they're marketing garbage, and I'm upset about it. And they don't
care.

Or alternatively, "The job of a software company is to make a profit for its
shareholders from selling software. Microsoft makes more profit than almost
any other software company. They do this by making finding out exactly what
the market says it wants, then building as much of that as they can while
staying under the price the market tells them it is willing to pay."

Don't get me wrong: I can think of a few improvements I would like to see
in Word too. But I am not willing to pay thirty-five thousand dollars a
copy for it, as you had to with one of its former competitors that
disappeared because its price made it unfit for its purpose.

But "speed" is not among my issues with Word.

If you're answer is to blame the OS and tell the poor user to buy
massive amount of new hardware, I'd say it's much _cheaper_ to trash
Word and use a different program.

Well, it probably wouldn't be. The hardware I am suggesting will cost maybe
three thousand dollars if he replaces his entire system. Software that will
do everything that Word will is not available on the Mac. Software that
comes close costs a lot more than that.

It would be best if Microsoft simply
cared a little and wrote a better program with those $56 Billion they
have in cash.

Well, Microsoft's shareholders don't agree with you. They believe Microsoft
should care about THEM. That's what American companies are supposed to do:
they are supposed to remove money from customers and give it to
shareholders. I wish I owned some Microsoft shares -- Anyone want to swap
for my Enron shares?

 

[sprev]

I don't have to. Word works at around 800 pages per second (on adequate
hardware...). Can you?

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 17 Jan 2004 11:25:16
-0800, (e-mail address removed) (M. Katz):


Spend a little time in the source code. All of that is being done by APPLE
code Word does NOT draw its own display! None of what you see on
screen from Word is drawn by Word - it's all produced using CarbonLib calls.

I know that there are issues with carbonised applications, but as a
recent switcher to the Mac I'm really shocked at how slow Word for the
Mac is---at least the testdrive version. To me this is a major issue,
I'm seriously thinking of switching back.

I'm using a brand new 1.25Ghz 15" Powerbook with 512Mb RAM, Panther
with all the latest updates. The machine is fantastic, fast and
responsive in all respects apart from typing in Word X. Typing in the
normal view, in comparison with Word running on *any* PC, just sucks.
The response on the screen is sluggish, with sometimes a notable delay
before the letters appear. This is insane that this is the case on a
top of the line machine. The typing is in normal view with all the
auto/checking options switched off, no other applications running, and
disk permissions fine.

Is Word on the Mac really meant to be this slow? To give those who
haven't experienced it some idea (because I wouldn't have believed it
until I saw it myself), Word X is much much less responsive on my
Powerbook than Word XP was on my 3 year old Pentium III 600Mhz laptop,
it is even much less responsive than Word 2000 on my 9 year old
Pentium I 32Mb RAM laptop running Windows 95! This is crazy! I had
assumed that my Powerbook was sufficient powerful that there couldn't
possibly be any performance issues in running a word processing
package, am I really wrong?

I've got three questions, and I'd really appreciate it if anyone could
help:

(1) I've been running the testdrive version of Word X, is the full
version with updates any faster?

(2) Is Word 2004 going to be any faster? (I couldn't give a damn about
extra features, all I want is for it to keep up with typed input in
the normal view!).

(3) Are there any plans to move to make Word a cocoa application in
which case these performance issues will presumably disappear?

 

[Beth Rosengard]

I know that there are issues with carbonised applications, but as a
recent switcher to the Mac I'm really shocked at how slow Word for the
Mac is---at least the testdrive version. To me this is a major issue,
I'm seriously thinking of switching back.

I'm using a brand new 1.25Ghz 15" Powerbook with 512Mb RAM, Panther
with all the latest updates. The machine is fantastic, fast and
responsive in all respects apart from typing in Word X. Typing in the
normal view, in comparison with Word running on *any* PC, just sucks.
The response on the screen is sluggish, with sometimes a notable delay
before the letters appear. This is insane that this is the case on a
top of the line machine. The typing is in normal view with all the
auto/checking options switched off, no other applications running, and
disk permissions fine.

Is Word on the Mac really meant to be this slow? To give those who
haven't experienced it some idea (because I wouldn't have believed it
until I saw it myself), Word X is much much less responsive on my
Powerbook than Word XP was on my 3 year old Pentium III 600Mhz laptop,
it is even much less responsive than Word 2000 on my 9 year old
Pentium I 32Mb RAM laptop running Windows 95! This is crazy! I had
assumed that my Powerbook was sufficient powerful that there couldn't
possibly be any performance issues in running a word processing
package, am I really wrong?

I've got three questions, and I'd really appreciate it if anyone could
help:

(1) I've been running the testdrive version of Word X, is the full
version with updates any faster?

(2) Is Word 2004 going to be any faster? (I couldn't give a damn about
extra features, all I want is for it to keep up with typed input in
the normal view!).

(3) Are there any plans to move to make Word a cocoa application in
which case these performance issues will presumably disappear?

Hi Sprev,

What you're describing is not normal. Did you read all the way back to the
beginning of this thread? I made a suggestion to the original poster which
may apply in this situation, namely ...

There are certain add-ins which can slow Word down. Check the Office>
Startup Items> Word folder. If you see the Acrobat plug-in PDFMaker, get
rid of it. You don't need it with Word's built-in ability to save as PDF.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[Roger Morris]

message > I don't
have to. Word works at around 800 pages per second (on adequate >
hardware...). Can you? > > This responds to
microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 17 Jan 2004 11:25:16 > -0800,
(e-mail address removed) (M. Katz): > > > All it takes is a little time with
some *other* Mac OS X programs to > > see that in terms of screen updates,
graphcs, text, long documents, > > and actual complex effects, Word's
screendrawing text rendering is > > just total cr*p. > > Spend a little
time in the source code. All of that is being done by APPLE > code
Word does NOT draw its own display! None of what you see on > screen from
Word is drawn by Word - it's all produced using CarbonLib calls. >

I know that there are issues with carbonised applications, but as a recent
switcher to the Mac I'm really shocked at how slow Word for the Mac
is---at least the testdrive version. To me this is a major issue, I'm
seriously thinking of switching back.

I'm using a brand new 1.25Ghz 15" Powerbook with 512Mb RAM, Panther with
all the latest updates. The machine is fantastic, fast and responsive in
all respects apart from typing in Word X. Typing in the normal view, in
comparison with Word running on *any* PC, just sucks. The response on the
screen is sluggish, with sometimes a notable delay before the letters
appear. This is insane that this is the case on a top of the line machine.
The typing is in normal view with all the auto/checking options switched
off, no other applications running, and disk permissions fine.

Is Word on the Mac really meant to be this slow? To give those who haven't
experienced it some idea (because I wouldn't have believed it until I saw
it myself), Word X is much much less responsive on my Powerbook than Word
XP was on my 3 year old Pentium III 600Mhz laptop, it is even much less
responsive than Word 2000 on my 9 year old Pentium I 32Mb RAM laptop
running Windows 95! This is crazy! I had assumed that my Powerbook was
sufficient powerful that there couldn't possibly be any performance issues
in running a word processing package, am I really wrong?

I've got three questions, and I'd really appreciate it if anyone could
help:

(1) I've been running the testdrive version of Word X, is the full version
with updates any faster?

(2) Is Word 2004 going to be any faster? (I couldn't give a damn about
extra features, all I want is for it to keep up with typed input in the
normal view!).

(3) Are there any plans to move to make Word a cocoa application in which
case these performance issues will presumably disappear?

I can't answer your questions but I can say that I do not have your
experience of Word being slow. (1Ghz iMac with 1Gb RAM, Panther 10.3.1,
Word X with all updates)

I have been unable to type fast enough to see any delay before letters
appear. Indeed I sometimes think the letters appear just before I hit
the keys (joking of course - I don't use auto complete or any other
magic tricks but it does indicate how fast I think Word is)

Could it be a set-up problem? or a problem document? Perhaps someone
will offer some pearls of wisdom. -- Roger

 

[sprev]

Hi Sprev,

What you're describing is not normal. Did you read all the way back to the
beginning of this thread? I made a suggestion to the original poster which
may apply in this situation, namely ...

There are certain add-ins which can slow Word down. Check the Office>
Startup Items> Word folder. If you see the Acrobat plug-in PDFMaker, get
rid of it. You don't need it with Word's built-in ability to save as PDF.

Thanks Beth, I did read all the way back and followed all of your
advice. I don't have PDFmaker or anything like that installed. The
powerbook is a clean install of Panther with Office testdrive on top.
The only non-standard things I have are Sidetrack (a different driver
for the trackpad) and Fn (a little program for switching the function
keys). I can't see how they could be making any difference.

Don't get me wrong, there isn't a *long* delay in the keystroke echo
in normal view. But there is a delay, it is noticeable. Word just
doesn't feel 'snappy' to respond to typed input. This is a major issue
for me. I don't care so much about features that are missing from the
Mac version, but I like to feel that the package can keep up with my
typing.

My experience on Windows versions was that no matter what the computer
was typing in normal view was always fast, snappy, and a pleasure to
use. I'm shocked to find that this isn't the case on the Mac. Compare
typing into Word in normal view with all the options switched off with
typing into a TextEdit box. The TextEdit box is much snappier and more
responsive. I type fast, but not *that* fast that Word running on
1.25Ghz processor shouldn't be able to keep up.

One thought though: I have the keyboard repeat and delay settings at
their fastest and shortest values respectively in the System
Preference panel. Does Word take notice of these setting? Is the full
(non-testdrive) version any more responsive?

Many thanks,
Sprev

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Sprev:

OK, I am *using* the next version of Word on a 667MHz PowerBook with 1GB of
RAM.

Yes, it is faster: around twice the speed, ten times faster for some tasks.

I am also running OS 10.3. That makes a big difference to the pauses:
system tuning is very much improved in 10.3. The pauses are caused by the
application waiting for processor or disk access, and they have become
progressively less offensive with each update on OS X. OS 10.1.5 was the
biggie: that rolled in a whole new version of Unix underneath.

You may wish to add another 512 MB of memory to that PowerBNook. It doesn't
need it, but it will go slightly faster if it has it.

However, I am afraid current Macs just don't match modern Windows hardware,
and that's something we have to live with. You are comparing a 1 GHz
processor and a 133 MHz system bus with a 3.2 GHz processor feeding an 800
MHz system bus. A Windows machine's disk spins at 7, 10 or 15,000 RPM. On
your PowerBook, the disk is moving at 4,500 RPM. The processor on the
machines you are talking about never throttles back: the PowerBook will
throttle the processor back while it's running on battery. Which is why it
really will get five hours on a battery, unlike the Dells that are gasping
for free electrons at two hours.

Mac OS X is going to get a lot better. Windows has ten years of tuning and
tweaking under it: Mac OS X is just starting down that path. Current
versions of Windows XP Pro and Home prioritize the console (keyboard and
display) over the applications. That makes them a lot more user-responsive,
at the expense of some application speed. I believe Mac OS, being based on
Unix, prioritizes the other way around: applications come first, then user
input.

Sorry: I miss the speed too. I do all my heavy hauling on the Windows box.
But I am writing this on the Mac. The Pentium is just too damned power
hungry and heavy to use on the train

Cheers

 

[sprev]

Many thanks for the information, John!

It reassuring to know that the next version of Word will be faster. I
hope that OS X keeps improving too. I look forward to a day when Word,
OS X, and me can work together in a pleasant harmonous way.

I still have to say that I'm surprised because the speed and
responsiveness decrement I saw was comparing Word's performance on my
top of the line 1.25Ghz G4 powerbook with my old relatively low-spec
4yr old 600-oddMhz 128Mb toshiba laptop that the powerbook was to
replace. I wasn't comparing it with anything like performance on a
modern 3Ghz Pentium 4 desktop PC. Anyway, I hope that the speed and
responsiveness of Word keeps improving, that would all be good.

In the meantime, I love my Mac and I spend a lot of time writing but
the lack of responsiveness in Word really bugs me. So I'm going to
switch to do most of my Mac work using LaTeX. Fortunately, there are
no responsiveness issues typing into an OS X text editor! Maybe one
day I'll switch back to Word.

Many thanks again for your help,
Sprev

 

[Michael Y]

Could it be a set-up problem? or a problem document? Perhaps someone
will offer some pearls of wisdom. -- Roger

I am glad to see this thread, because I was beginning to wonder if it
was just me who was finding Word X slow. After using Word 2000 under
Windows 2000 for three years, I recently converted fulltime to OS X. I
have used PC and Macs for over 10 years also.

My setup. Powerbook 12" 867 MHz. OS X 10.3.2. RAM 640 MB. Hard drive
60 GB. Word X with all the updates.

Word is SLOW on this Powerbook. With all the tricks of turning this
and that off in Word X, except spell checking because if I turn that
off I might as well be using a freeware text editor, and using normal
view, Word becomes tolerable. I am a middling typist and if I can out
type Word then Word has the problem. I have played with a few other
word processors and I do not out type them. So, I do not understand
why Word being slow is the fault of Apple hardware or OS X.

And after everything is turned off in Word then all I any really using
Word for is the Word format that I have used for the last 4 years. It
doesn't make sense.

Michael

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Michael:

Just a thought: For us PowerBook types, it helps to keep an eye on the
NETWORK! Connecting a PowerBook (mine's a 667 MHz so you're spoilt...) to a
1 GB Ethernet cable on a busy corporate network can suck significant amounts
of the processor's attention!

You might also want to throw a bit extra memory into that box: 10.3 is quite
smart at caching things in RAM if there's RAM available to do that in.

But yeah: Word makes lots and lots of "little" interrupts to both the
processor and the disk. Early versions of OS X were better suited to
relatively few LARGE interrupts. The time slices were too long: Word was
being given (I think it was) 20 millisecond slices but it only needed half a
millisecond or so, but it needs them far more frequently than it was getting
them, because it relinquishes the processor very readily, then there's this
long pause while it can't get it back again...

As I said, 10.3 is fairly silky and the next version of Word is a lot better
tuned too.

Cheers

 

[Michael Y]

Hi Michael:

Just a thought: For us PowerBook types, it helps to keep an eye on the
NETWORK! Connecting a PowerBook (mine's a 667 MHz so you're spoilt...) to a
1 GB Ethernet cable on a busy corporate network can suck significant amounts
of the processor's attention!

Word X is slow whether it is on quiet home Extreme Airport network or
small office network.

You might also want to throw a bit extra memory into that box: 10.3 is quite
smart at caching things in RAM if there's RAM available to do that in.

I am reasonably certain that my Powerbook RAM is already maxed at 640
MB.

But yeah: Word makes lots and lots of "little" interrupts to both the
processor and the disk. Early versions of OS X were better suited to
relatively few LARGE interrupts. The time slices were too long: Word was
being given (I think it was) 20 millisecond slices but it only needed half a
millisecond or so, but it needs them far more frequently than it was getting
them, because it relinquishes the processor very readily, then there's this
long pause while it can't get it back again... Interesting.


As I said, 10.3 is fairly silky and the next version of Word is a lot better
tuned too.

You know, I prefer Apple products. I even recently converted to OS X
fulltime, but I find Windows 2000 much more stable and without
spinning pizza wheel equivalents. (No flames please. I already said I
prefer Apple products.)

As for Word X I hope the next version is better, because I am about to
spring for a lightweight word processor, such as Mariner Write or even
AppleWorks, and couple it with MacLinkPlus to access Word format
documents. The current Word X is a dog. I am very disappointed. :-(

However I am not disappointed with this thread. People have
contributed some very useful information and I appreciate the
thoughtful dialog.

Michael

 

[ggbotero]

I have foundt that word is slow on the powerbooks but not on the powermacs even thought the powerbook has more memory and a faster processor than the powermac. It would seem that it is not a OS X issue or a Word issue but maybe a hardware issue? Any thoughts?