Problematic PowerPoint 2008
While the only problem I’ve seen so far with Word 2008 is that the last line of a paragraph does not always properly redraw, the story is much worse when talking about PowerPoint 2008. I finally had a chance to try to use it last week, and it just was not a pretty experience. The application performed so sluggishly I was wishing for my copy of Office 2004, which I no longer had on my machine.
The job became to take a template file built in Office 2003 (for Windows) and make from that a presentation I could give to my co-workers. While PowerPoint 2008 imported it without a problem, screen redraws in PP 2008 became incredibly slow. By that I mean I even had to wait for the OS X spinning beachball to quit spinning. It made trying to build only a slide that incorporated only graphics in the title bar and text in the main body impossible. Such poor performance was not only unexpected but was intolerable. Luckily, I discovered I didn’t have to complete the presentation and was able to give up on it, which was a good thing. I doubt if I could have finished it using PP2008. I was going to have to flip back to my workplace’s PowerPoint 2003 to make it work.
In looking at other user comments elsewhere on the web, I’m not the only Mac user seeing this kind of lackluster performance out of PowerPoint 2008 and, in some cases, Office 2008 in general. Some folks have found that Office 2008 is conflicting with third party font managers, but I don’t have one of those, so that doesn’t explain the spinning beach balls in my case. It’s kind of hard to understand how Microsoft and the Mac Business Unit in particular missed this one.
Add to all this the revelation that data in Office 2008 files may not be seen by Office 2007, and one has to wonder just what the hell Microsoft has been doing with their time. It looks strongly like they need to be working a lot more on product quality and less on anti-piracy; if this keeps up, no one’s going to want their stuff even if they can get it for free.
Hopefully a timely patch from MS will solve the compatibility and speed problems for what could be at least a very good product.
The job became to take a template file built in Office 2003 (for Windows) and make from that a presentation I could give to my co-workers. While PowerPoint 2008 imported it without a problem, screen redraws in PP 2008 became incredibly slow. By that I mean I even had to wait for the OS X spinning beachball to quit spinning. It made trying to build only a slide that incorporated only graphics in the title bar and text in the main body impossible. Such poor performance was not only unexpected but was intolerable. Luckily, I discovered I didn’t have to complete the presentation and was able to give up on it, which was a good thing. I doubt if I could have finished it using PP2008. I was going to have to flip back to my workplace’s PowerPoint 2003 to make it work.
In looking at other user comments elsewhere on the web, I’m not the only Mac user seeing this kind of lackluster performance out of PowerPoint 2008 and, in some cases, Office 2008 in general. Some folks have found that Office 2008 is conflicting with third party font managers, but I don’t have one of those, so that doesn’t explain the spinning beach balls in my case. It’s kind of hard to understand how Microsoft and the Mac Business Unit in particular missed this one.
Add to all this the revelation that data in Office 2008 files may not be seen by Office 2007, and one has to wonder just what the hell Microsoft has been doing with their time. It looks strongly like they need to be working a lot more on product quality and less on anti-piracy; if this keeps up, no one’s going to want their stuff even if they can get it for free.
Hopefully a timely patch from MS will solve the compatibility and speed problems for what could be at least a very good product.
posted by Andy Foster at
4:07 AM
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