From the “Only of interest to those who own a Mac” Dept.

I use Microsoft Word 2000 at work for word processing, but recently I’ve been using my iBook. Now normally I would use my PC, but I am currently working on a large technical document and I needed the added oomph of 640 MB of RAM rather than the piddly 128 MB on my Desktop PC.

A lot of reviewers say that Word v.X (Macintosh) is on par, if not better, than Word XP (PC) feature-per-feature. It does have some nice touches, but the performance on my iBook Dual USB 600 MHz is terrible!

So I spent a good half-hour trying to tweak Word v.X for more speed.

Here is a list of things that you can do to help reduce the sluggishness of MS Word vX (your mileage will vary of course):

• Turn off Real-time Word Count: Go into your Preferences : View and un-check the “Live Word Count” option. It is located in the Row for “Window Settings”, sub-tended under the “Status Bar”
• Keep the Document in “Normal View”: I found that while editing in “Page Layout View” the automatic repagination of the document really slows down editing. This problem is compounded when the document increases in size and complexity. I only use “Page Layout View” for previewing the documents now and do my editing in “Normal View”. When in “Normal View” make sure that the you’ve deselected Background Repagination. You can find that option in your Preferences : General listing. I wonder why I don’t see a significant performance hit in MS Word 2000 and XP on the PC?
• Deselect “Enable Quartz Text Smoothing”: I found this tip at Mac OS X Hints. It doesn’t suprise me that quartz font smoothing is a resource hog. Some say that you should try this tip with Unsanity.com’s SILK haxie.
• Deselect both “Provide Feedback with Sound” and “Provide Feedback with Animation” options: To me, these two options are useless bloat, and unless you need these two “accessibility features”, I would turn them off. You can find them in your Preferences : General Options.
• Turn off “WYSIWYG Style and Font Menus” from your General : Preferences: I realise that this is an optional setting, and that in most cases it probably doesn’t amount to much of a performance increase, but since I can’t easily navigate the style menu via keyboard shortcuts (at least I don’t think so), I turned it off. Granted, the negative impact isn’t nearly as great as MS Word’s (all versions; for every platform) poor style-sheet management and autoformat features—Don’t get me started about the number of bad style sheets I’ve encountered……
• Finally (for those who are brave), you can turn off the “Check Spelling as you Type” and “Check Grammar as you Type” options: I haven’t done this yet, but if you consistently spell check your documents after you finish writing them, than why not? There must be some sort of performance penalty when those are in use.
• Update 2003/03/03 – Remove pdfMaker.dot in Word v.X’s startup folder: If you have installed Adobe Acrobat 5 on you mac, remove the “pdfMaker.dot “ from “Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office/Startup/Word” Folder. Apparently this will significantly reduce the start up time

Sorry for the rather esoteric subject, but it really pisses me off when I can type text faster than my iBook can render it on-screen in MS Word v.X.

For those interested, I found that the Quartz Smoothing trick and the Turn off Background Repagination trick worked the best. I will experiment with grammar and spell checking.

If anyone finds this page, and has thoughts (excluding comments along the lines of, “By a faster Mac”) or other speed tips, please leave a comment so that others can read this blog posting.

Cheers,

Tai