Office 2007 Good… and slow
March 28, 2007 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I’ve been using Office 2007 now just about exclusively since the initial beta versions have been available for use. I will say that I love the new versions of each application. Similarly to other users, I still find myself searching through some options to find the task that I’ve done before, but am only doing for the first time in 2007. However, more frequently, I find myself making use of a new feature I’d never used previously because of the ease of use in the new version and the fact it wasn’t buried in multi-level menus for me to find it.
One thing I’ve lost touch with a little bit in my usage over the past year or so though is that it is a little bit slower than previous versions. Some things take a bit longer to fire up, but once they’re rolling, I believe things work a little faster. It all seems to come down to personal preference though again.
David Szpunar a network and systems manager at a large church has similar experience as well. This recent blog post by him gives a nice overview of his experience so far with the application and whether or not he’ll be migrating their entire user base to the new version anytime soon.
My one complaint? Office 2007 is S-L-O-W. My laptop is a Centrino Duo 2.0 GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM (running XP Pro). Opening OneNote, Word, and Outlook 2007 along with Firefox and Thunderbird works, but it takes a while to get them all open. Or if all of that except for Word is running, and I open Word, it takes a while to get there. Office 2003, on the other hand, pops up and down very quickly for the most part. 2003 has its moments, to be sure, but 2007 is just consistently slow to get going, and sometimes slow to catch up. And it’s not just because I occasionally have over 100 tabs open in Firefox, either! (I try not to do that too often :-)
David? 100 tabs open in Firefox? Please tell me you’re exaggerating a wee little bit there. I can’t even imagine having that many open windows or things going at once and I consider myself a fairly skilled multi-tasker.
Thanks for the quote–but no, 100 is, if anything, an underestimate. I have 53 tabs open on my laptop right now, and my desktop at my regular office probably has 70, but I’ve easily been over 100 several times. I tend to do research and open a lot of tabs, which lead to more good links but I’m not finished with the old ones so I keep them open, and then I don’t have time to finish everything and close them before the next task or the next day when I keep going. Then I just spend an hour or two every so often going through and closing anything I don’t need anymore, and del.icio.us-saving anything I want to save. I pay for it with a slow browser occasionally, but Session Restore in Firefox 2+ usually fixes things with a quick restart and I’m back where I left off :-) I keep trying to cut back the number of tabs, it just grows again!!!
I just love it.
specially MS word
I am having the same problem, exploer, firefox all take 3-4 minutes to open! Passwords entered by Roboform lock up the web site for about 1 minute, then open, does anyone know a fix?
ya its not bad:)
When plotting thousands to hundred-thousands of points, the difference between Excel in Office 2007 and Office 2003 is huge. The newer version really cannot deal with plots larger than about 5000 points with any sort of efficiency. (usless you are ok with waiting minutes between each click).
caveat: i am new to vista and office 07, so i am not sure that the problem is not vista.