Macbook Pro and Powerpoint (Yechhh)

Sorry, but Office for Mac is a slug compaired to the XP version. I have a Dual G5 with 2.5 gigs of ram, and Office drives me insane! Powerpoint especially. The metafile conversion alone is painfull enough...

Tracy,

I don't get that! I use Office All Day LONG! On Windows and Mac. I have to tell you, give me the Mac anyday! I do admit that I don't do much PowerPoint, but everything else is just great!

Very odd that our experiences are so opposite each other! But isn't that what makes the world go around?

LOL!

Bob

It sounds like you are having problems with memory management. I have had this sometimes, usually when I'm running Photoshop and have been editing large photos. Then the other applications, such as PowerPoint, slow down. But as I said, the other day I had all those prograns open THEN ran PowerPoint, and it ran just fine.

I just got Macbook Pro and power point is extremely slow. In fact, it uses all the memory and hangs up the computer. I had one chart graphic (jpg file) and it completely stalled my computer. I have been a PC user and this is my first experience with Mac and I am highly disappointed. Most of my work requires using Power Point. I hope somebody has a solution to this unacceptable situation. I am surprised that why Apple did not come out up front and announced this problem. PLease HELP

I have been using Powerpoint and Keynote for years on my G5 tower and 12" Powerbook. I noticed some time ago that both programs will slow down if there are a lot of files, photos, etc on the desktop. I ususally had the desktop pretty loaded so I could have ready access while building slides. Since I cleaned my desktop, this problem has gone away. I do not have a Macbook Pro (yet). Perhaps the differences reported by different users represents the tidiness of their deskstop. Just a thought.

G5 & Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.6)

The problem is that Office apps are not universal binaries and consequently must run via Rosetta. This makes them considerably slower than universal apps would be. You could try switching to Keynote (part of iWork '06) which is a universal binary and will work better on Intel Macs. Keynote will work with Powerpoint files, although I don't know to what degree they translate into Keynote.

I don't know what version of Office you are using, but I use Office 2004 X, vers. 11.2.3 (the latest version) and have no problems with Powerpoint on my MBP other than it runs slower because of Rosetta. Note that problems with Office on Intel Macs has nothing to do with Apple. Office is a Microsoft application, and any problems you have with it should be addressed to Microsoft, not Apple.

Dealing with non-universal apps is something Apple addressed at the very beginning of the introduction of Intel Macs. Apple has no responsibility for problems with third-party applications unless those problems can be traced to a bug in the operating system.

As a kindly aside: it's considered poor etiquette to post your problem on another person's thread. It's called threadjacking and is frowned upon. You should instead post your own separate topic. When you are on the page that lists all the available topics, look at the top of the list on the left where you should see "Post a Topic" in bold. Click on that to begin your own topic.

I've heard that keynote works natively with the remote. Powerpoint might require more fiddling...

Same thing here. Had a Spreadsheet open in Excel last night with 3 megs of graphs & charts going. That thing was CRAWLING. I copied them into a thesis doc in Word... Same thing. Takes a half a minute to simply page down. 3 megs of graphs shouldn't slow things that badly. I have the 2.16 with 2 Gb of memory.

Just hold out for the Universal MS Office. Or see if you can make due with the iWork.

This really *** for me this week. I have a Power Point presentation Monday night to defend my thesis in front of the Deans of the University... gulp. And only two weeks before graduation - NOT looking forward to Monday. Wish my MS apps were running better on the MBP. But part of the process of deciding to use new technology. Hang in there. C'mooooonnnnnn Universal Apps. We need ya.

Hi,
Even I experience similar problem with Excel (Office v.x)
Their are latency issues when punching in numbers/formula.
Its quite irritating....
I hope Microsoft/Apple can address this soon...
Regards,
Bharat

i agree, that comment was uncalled for and completely ridiculous. the whole point of these forums is not people to compete to get the trophy for biggest mac enthausiast. the whole point is for people that are new to macs, or who just have a question, to ask their questions and get responses from people with more knowledge (such as yourself, maybe?). this saves us all the pain of phoning up customer support and is generally an environment for people to learn a lot more than they were possibly intending to find out.

you never know, even you might learn something new...

in response to this thread however, i own a copy of office 2004 teacher/student and although it is noticibly slower than universal apps (since all versions of office run under rosetta) it is by no means painfully slow. i use word the most and am very impressed with it (certainly runs no slower than it did on my old pc). admittidly start up is a little dragging, but once loaded its perfect. tried powerpoint too and no problems there either. im really excited to know that there will be a universal binary of this next year, which can only run faster!!

beans. 🙂

Folks, I had Exactly these problems with my new Mac Book Pro 1GB. I had Excel hanging on me and needing to force quit, PowerPoint was slow (latency problems.) I even had other apps. have problems with exiting (TextEdit, Camino) and needing to be Force Quit

The behavior I was seeing strongly suggested a couple things:
1. I was running out of memory
2. I had a weak (bad) SODIM
3. There was a Memory Management bug in OS X

The other day I went to my Apple store and put in another 1GB of Memory. WOW! What a difference! The Macbook runs NOTICEABLY faster. It's more snappy. My Office 2004 problems almost disappeared entirely.

I was only able to re-create the problems by having 16 apps. loaded and running: Finder, Dashboard, Address Book, Calendar, Safari, Camino, iTunes, Powerpoint, Excel, Word, Entourage, X11, Adobe, and TextEdit.

Use Activity Monitor, and switch to System Memeory and LOOK what is going on in your system. When I had that all loaded up, I had 0 Free Memory, and 15+GB of Virutal Memory allocated.

Now even if the system has ALL memory allocated, Apps should not hang - run excruciatingly slow, yes, but not hang. I strongly suspect there is a bug swimming around in OS X Memory Management, and rest assured Apple will find it.

Activity Monitor is a beautiful thing, and if you are having these problems, you should use it! I have had Word jump off into Never Never Land twice, and consume 190+% of my CPU's doing NOTHING (Application not Responding.) W/out Activity Monitor, I would have never known that I had only 2% of my CPU's left. (Force Quit or Quit Process in Activity Monitor will cure a wild Word.)

If you have 2GB of RAM already, and are having this problem, I would try pulling an SODIMM and see if the problem stays or goes. Only run 1-4 apps at a time for this test!! Then try swapping SODIMMS. If you can isolate the problem to 1 SODIMM, then get Apple (or whoever) to replace it. If pulling SODIMMs doe not allow you to isolate the problem, either you have 2 bad SODIMMS (unlikely,) or a bad logic board. Return it to Apple for repair or replacement.

IMHO, of course.

Has everyone here who has performance issues with MS Office 2004 installed the latest updates in MS AutoUpdate? The latest update that came out a few weeks ago improved performance under Rosetta.

open source have you ever tried using open source
using x11

i use open source which has power point in it you can download from internet
i find opening x11 takes some time initially to open maybe 2 minutes or more
and so i hope with more ram things will quiken up
how much ram do you have on your machine

I can confirm that the Apple Remote does work with Keynote - no adjustments required - forward and reverse.
I cannot get this remote to work with Powerpoint. I have seen others post that they have had success with this, but out of the box, this did not work for me. I haven't seen any information regarding how you might get this to happen. I would suspect that you could try doing something with Keyboard shortcuts.
However, I use the Logitech Presenter 2.4GHz ... and that works just fine for both Keynote and Powerpoint. The benefit is that it is RF vs. IR. The apple remote is IR, so it needs a direct line of sight, which can be tricky if you are presenting and cannot be close and in front of the IR receiver on the MacBook.

Use iRed Lite. It works great for PowerPoint and anything else you might want to control with the Apple Remote.