10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004

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Wed, May 31 2006 at 7:30AM PDT • Contributed by: NipperSpot

In Mac OS X 10.4.6, if you installed all Microsoft Office 2004 Updates up to 11.2.3, and experience slowness (lags of up to five to fifteen seconds in Word, Excel, Entourage, etc.), the slowness is from Spotlight. The workaround is: open System Preferences, click Spotlight, click on Privacy, and add the 'Microsoft User Data' folder, located in your user's Documents folder, to the list of excluded items.

In Entourage 2004, you will need to disable Spotlight. Open Preferences: Spotlight and unselect 'Include Entourage items in Spotlight search results.'

[robg adds: I have the latest updates installed, and haven't experienced any such slowdowns. However, I don't use Entourage, and I don't work on massive Word documents. If you are experiencing slowdowns, though, this solution might be worth a shot.]

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10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004 | 14 comments | Create New Account

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10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: RussellK on Wed, May 31 2006 at 8:31AM PDT

Thanks for this...I'd been experiencing significant lags in Entourage 2004, and had already added my MS User Data folder to Spotlight's Privacy list because I suspected Spotlight might be the culprit, but I'd not noticed the new Spotlight preference item in Entourage's preference pane.

Now, I'll have to decide between the "pros" of having my Entourage items show up in Spotlight searches and the "cons" of the Entourage lag I was experiencing. Too bad this trade-off decision has to be made...

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: cwooster on Wed, May 31 2006 at 9:09AM PDT

Absolutely and immediately cleared up the mysterious 5-7 second beach ball while composing in Entourage.

Completely frustrating for awhile now... THANKS so much for passing this along.

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: gcastaneda on Wed, May 31 2006 at 9:19AM PDT

I anticipated Entourage integration into Spotlight for a long time. When it got here, I was a bit disappointed, but not because of the way Spotlight works, but because of the way information is organized in email clients, such as Entourage. When I search in Spotlight for a specific word or phrase, many Entourage results show up, but none of them are indicative of the result I am looking for. As an example, I get 10 to 20 Spotlight results with the same text, mainly, the email's subject field. This is not what I was expecting, but it is a good start. I am sure there will be improvements forthcoming.

On another note, I have never experienced any lag/delay when composing new messages on Entourage after Spotlight intergation. The same with Word. No delays.

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: bdog on Wed, May 31 2006 at 10:33AM PDT

Does manually deleting the entire spotlight DB, rebooting, then letting it rebuild fix the slowness?

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: Fenris64 on Wed, May 31 2006 at 11:50AM PDT

We found that uninstalling Norton AV had precisely the same effect as disabling Spotlight for Entourage and that the two together put speeds back wheer we had them before the Office updates.

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The whatchamacallit has to be whatever or else the whosits will go hey-hey.
~ Dilbert

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: vincentvanwylick on Thu, Jun 1 2006 at 6:56AM PDT

Excel hangs when I add it as one of my Login-items in the Account-preferences. The logo hangs forever and it takes 2-3 mins for excel to start up (during the normal running of OS X on my iBook G4, it takes around 10 seconds). I'm not sure if this is due to the update, as I only recently implemented this (it contains my todos, etc.) Does anyone have a way around this?

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: funkymonkey on Thu, Jun 1 2006 at 7:49AM PDT

If you have a lot of fonts installed on your system Excel takes forever at launch to 'optimize' its font menu. this is the case for Word and PowerPoint also but they never seem to take as long as Excel.

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: vincentvanwylick on Thu, Jun 1 2006 at 10:41AM PDT

I only have the standard nr. of fonts, around 80, I guess that's not the reason. But thanks for the suggestion.

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Thu, Jun 1 2006 at 11:03AM PDT

I haven't had any slowdowns in Entourage or Word, since the last MS update, and I use them every day. Prior to the update I found this fix did speed things up a little.

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G4/Digital Audio/1GHz, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.4.6 • www.david-schwab.com

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: RussellK on Mon, Jun 5 2006 at 1:25PM PDT

Just to clarify: the "lags" I was experiencing were restricted to Entourage. They did not happen while composing messages; rather, they occurred (seemingly randomly) while trying to browse my various folders and subfolders within my main mail account (a POP account). I would select a folder whose contents I wanted to view, and Entourage would just "freeze" for long moments before displaying the list of messages in that folder.

My Entourage use is quite heavy...I have dozens of folders (clients) each with numerous subfolders (specific projects), and my user data hovers around the 3.5 Gig mark (as long as I remember to clean out old projects when I feel it's safe to do so).

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: sys0p on Sat, Jun 3 2006 at 5:44PM PDT

What a great hint!

For years it annoyed me so much that Word just jumped from time to time to 100% CPU usage without any reason. Then after saving the file, this behaviour was gone for "some" minutes. This is especially annoying if you have to work on the train and you want to save battery power. Anyway, after applying this hint Word never became a CPU hog anymore!

Thanx a lot!

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: DCSaabGuy on Tue, Jun 6 2006 at 1:55PM PDT

Thanks! That made a big difference!

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: Kerrstr on Tue, Jun 6 2006 at 6:21PM PDT

Excellent hint! This has made a HUGE difference in my Excel startup times.

Thanks!!!

10.4: A workaround for slowdowns in updated Office 2004
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Mon, Nov 13 2006 at 11:21PM PST

For anyone wondering why they don't see the Word slowdowns that some other see, it happens when you keep a large document open, on the order of about four megabytes or larger. I see it all the time, with a document on OS X topics and bugfixes I often open, that's about 9 meg now. I usually have to close it when it slows down the Mac, and slows down my work on other Word documents; processor time it eats up can go as high as 50%. I've seen this plenty even on a Quicksilver 800 MHz, running Office 2004 11.2.3, OS 10.4.8; now I have a Mirrored Drive Door dual 1.25 GHz, and I still see these delays, but not as much, but far more than I'd expect from a Mac like this. Shows how badly at least part of Word is programmed.

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