Word X Stalls
Pierre Igot
experiencing what I will try to describe below.
I find Word X VERY slow on both my PowerMac G4/450 and my PowerBook
G4/400. As soon as there is something else going on in the background,
everything becomes slow as molasses. It's very frustrating for a fast
typist like me, because I always end up being too far ahead of what's
happening on the screen, so I have to backtrack all the time.
I know that a good part of it is due to OS X's own sluggishness, but
Word X really adds its own significant sluggishness as well.
The most annoying part is those constant "stalls" that happen while
I'm doing something in Word. I click on a button, or I try to select
some text, or I try to enter a value in a field, whatever -- and Word
stalls, doing nothing for several seconds. It EVENTUALLY does on the
screen what it is supposed to do, but it can take up to 10 seconds! I
found that I could cut the wait short by pressing a non-important key,
but it's annoying as hell!
For example, if I am in a fairly large document and I want to do a
search/replace, but I want to check each occurrence to decide whether
I want to replace the occurrence or leave it as is (this is something
I often have to do). So I put my stuff in the search and replace
fields, and I hit "Find Next". Word jumps to the next occurrence in
the doc. I decide I don't want to change that one, so I hit "Find
Next" again... And then, nothing moves on the screen. One second. Two
seconds. Three seconds. Still nothing is moving. EVENTUALLY, after 6
or 7 seconds, it finally jumps to the next occurrence. I click on
"Find Next" again. Same thing. Word stalls. I found that if I press a
key like the right cursor key, which has no value in the Find/Replace
dialog, then I can cut the wait short. Clicking on the Find Next
button causes a stall, but hitting the right cursor key right after
that cuts the stall short and shows the next occurrence right away.
But it's annoying as hell!
And this is just a particular example. These stalls occur EVERYWHERE,
for every function in Word, from typing text to using a dialog to
selecting a few paragraphs to clicking on a toolbar button.
EVERYTHING. Moving the mouse or hitting a key that doesn't have any
impact on what you are trying to do cuts the stalls short, but the
stalls shouldn't be happening in the first place! It obviously is not
a performance issue, because moving the mouse or hitting a key cuts
the wait, so the wait is not caused by Word executing code or
anything. (The spinning beach ball does not appear.) It is, quite
literally, a STALL. And it happens all the time.
Has anyone else experienced this at all with Word X? It never used to
happen with Word 2001, and it certainly never happens with any other
OS X app I use.
I spent a lot of time explaining all this to a MS tech support person
(using the MS Support web site), and they were utterly unable to
reproduce the problem. Then I had the opportunity to communicate with
someone else at Microsoft, who got back to me after SR1 was released
to ask me whether the stalls were gone or not, because he thought that
"they" had fixed the problem in SR1. But the stalls are still there.
:-(
I have described my experience in another article:
http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_29.shtml
It's immensely frustrating. And I have read other reports by other
people describing the exact same behaviour, on similarly equipped
machines. So it's not unique to my situation (and it affects Word X on
both my PM G4 and my PB G4).
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Pierre
---
LATEXT - Literature and Visual Arts http://www.latext.com
"Apple Peel" Columnist at Applelust.com
![John McGhie [MVP - Word]'s profile photo](http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/ALV-UjUUBKAjV8QW66Rah4TWGr_ASZh1CyehMN6s11i8zY3oOiau=s40-c)
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
As far as I know, everyone gets them.
It's that OS X thread priority issue I mentioned. Word is a fairly serious
App with lots of threads and it uses a lot of horsepower.
We need the operating system to pick up the phone a bit more often than it
does (man, you should see how it crawls on OS 10.1.3 :-))
It's a system tuning issue. If you want (and know how) you can play around
with the OS X task and thread priorities to remove the stalls, but I
wouldn't: you are likely to find that other tasks die instead.
System tuning is a bit of a black art: it takes time and knowledge. And
right now they're all too busy: they have to perfect the new version of
iTunes...
Cheers
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 17 Jul 2002 05:13:39
-0700, appl...@applelust.com (Pierre Igot):
Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:jo...@mcghie-information.com.au
Pierre Igot
> Hi Pierre:
>
> As far as I know, everyone gets them.
Everyone gets them... ONLY IN WORD.
>
> It's that OS X thread priority issue I mentioned. Word is a fairly serious
> App with lots of threads and it uses a lot of horsepower.
I'd respectfully suggest that apps such as InDesign and Photoshop
require more horsepower than a word processor. Yet, strangely, they
are not affected by such stalls.
>
> We need the operating system to pick up the phone a bit more often than it
> does (man, you should see how it crawls on OS 10.1.3 :-))
>
> It's a system tuning issue. If you want (and know how) you can play around
> with the OS X task and thread priorities to remove the stalls, but I
> wouldn't: you are likely to find that other tasks die instead.
I'd respectfully suggest that, since Word is the only OS X app that
suffers from these stalls, it might have more to do with the way WORD
operates than with the responsiveness of Mac OS X.
As I said, Word is the ONLY app that has these stalls.
Other apps do suffer from OS X's over sluggishness, but not in such an
in-your-face, obtrusive way.
As well, since, as I said, moving the mouse or typing a key on the
keyboard does "wake" Word up again BEFORE the end of the stall, it
seems to me that it is Word that is asleep at the wheel, not OS X.
Just trying to talk common sense here.
If the issue is OS X responsiveness, then how come no other OS X app
is affected by the stalls (which, I repeat, are NOT characterized by
the "spinning beach ball" symptom, as most other apps are, and as Word
itself also is, of course).
>
> System tuning is a bit of a black art: it takes time and knowledge. And
> right now they're all too busy: they have to perfect the new version of
> iTunes...
John,
I respectfully suggest that you lay off the snide "iTunes" remarks.
They do nothing to advance the cause of Microsoft as a whole (who's
busy pushing Windows Media Player 9 as we speak, BTW) and of your own
approach in particular.
A lot of people love music as much as they love computing (if not much
more), and iTunes does a great job of organizing one's music
collection. It might not be "work", but that doesn't mean it's not
important. It's part of what makes the VALUE of the Mac. It's
obviously not your area, so I respectfully suggest that you stick to
what you are supposed to talk about :).
Pierre
Steve Xylo
"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
> It's that OS X thread priority issue I mentioned. Word is a fairly serious
> App with lots of threads and it uses a lot of horsepower.
>
> We need the operating system to pick up the phone a bit more often than it
> does (man, you should see how it crawls on OS 10.1.3 :-))
>
This is quite extraordinary. You are blaming Apple's OS for the
notorious unresponsiveness and sluggishness of your app, which
sluggishness is not shared by many other X-native apps that do a lot
more serious number-crunching work. I shouldn't be amazed, given that
this is Microsoft, but hell, I still am.
S
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 18 Jul 2002 16:38:03
-0700, appl...@applelust.com (Pierre Igot):
> I'd respectfully suggest that apps such as InDesign and Photoshop
> require more horsepower than a word processor. Yet, strangely, they
> are not affected by such stalls.
You are talking about the OS X native version, a Carbon version, or a
Classic version?
In Classic, you have a co-operatively multi-tasking model. If you decide
not to "cooperate" you can grab the CPU and hog it until you are done. No
nasty Task Manager to come around and throw you out of the shower because
you're hogging all the hot water. If you don't mind the queue of yelling
family members hopping from one foot to the other at the bathroom door, you
can take your sweet time, and everyone else suffers.
In a Carbon version, you can do this too. You shouldn't: it's not very
nice, but you can. Virtual PC had to do it to get enough performance out of
OS X to run properly. They apologise for it in their README :-) Microsoft
elected not to do this, because they want to be good Apple citizens. And
they never believed that Apple would leave OS X this way just to force us
all to spend money on OS 10.2.
In a Cocoa app (native OS X) you can't get away with it. You can lift your
thread priority and hopefully you will get enough CPU to do your job, but
ultimately the system will decide when you have had enough.
> I'd respectfully suggest that, since Word is the only OS X app that
> suffers from these stalls, it might have more to do with the way WORD
> operates than with the responsiveness of Mac OS X.
Sure: We're trying to be nice and not disadvantage other applications.
Maybe we should have done what VPC did: let Word hog the CPU and make all
the other applications look bad.
> As well, since, as I said, moving the mouse or typing a key on the
> keyboard does "wake" Word up again BEFORE the end of the stall, it
> seems to me that it is Word that is asleep at the wheel, not OS X.
Duh! The Mouse is an OS X SYSTEM process, not a Word process. And it is
(necessarily) one of the highest priority tasks there is. Moving the mouse
does NOT wake Word up, it wakes up the *system*. Pierre, I told you this
twice already. I love a reasoned debate as much as the next man, but when
we have dealt with an issue, do me a favour: don't keep bringing it back and
back and back just because you don't *like* the answer :-)
> Just trying to talk common sense here.
I do wish you were :-) I do have other users on this newsgroup that are
needing answers to problems they have right now :-)
> I respectfully suggest that you lay off the snide "iTunes" remarks.
Why? Can I bag Windows Media Player instead then? Sorry: This group
focuses on getting a piece of mission-critical software (Word) to work. I
really cannot warmly support Apple's business decision to stop fixing stuff
in OS X and expend scarce resource in making a better iTunes.
Besides: I have a friend who is a professional musician. You want to hear
his bitterness about the fact that he doesn't get paid for any of those
computer copies of his life work out there.
Cheers
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Sat, 20 Jul 2002
01:38:04 +0100, Steve Xylo <s...@nowhere.invalid>:
Well, Word is not a native app, it's a Carbon app.
I can't do other than tell you what the issue *is*. Word is multi-threaded.
When it relinquishes control, it takes a while to get it back. On Windows
XP, the same code does not take forever to regain control. Everything runs
a lot more smoothly.
The other issue, which I understand poorly myself, is event reporting. OS X
can take up to 10 seconds to report events to Word.
However, if all you want to do is indulge in a religious argument, please
feel free, but if you will excuse me, I have other things to do :-)
Best cheers
Steve Xylo
"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
Hi John,
Let me apologise for my somewhat intemperate remarks; I certainly don't
want to get into a "religious" argument ;-) But it does strike me that
Word should really not require that much horsepower if all I'm doing is
typing text into a page. Until I start doing crazy things with tables,
graphs and so on, why should it be any less responsive than TextEdit? I
think that's what many people are wondering.
But the below is really a bit much:
> Besides: I have a friend who is a professional musician. You want to hear
> his bitterness about the fact that he doesn't get paid for any of those
> computer copies of his life work out there.
You know what? I'm a musician too. And iTunes is not responsible for
music piracy. In fact, iTunes lets me easily encode promotional bits of
my work into mp3 and let other people hear it. So I'm afraid that's just
a silly argument.
Best wishes,
Steve
Pierre Igot
> Hi Pierre:
>
> This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 18 Jul 2002 16:38:03
> -0700, appl...@applelust.com (Pierre Igot):
>
> > I'd respectfully suggest that apps such as InDesign and Photoshop
> > require more horsepower than a word processor. Yet, strangely, they
> > are not affected by such stalls.
>
> You are talking about the OS X native version, a Carbon version, or a
> Classic version?
Carbon, of course. I specifically said in my post that Word X is the
only ***OS X*** app affected by these stalls.
Interestingly, Word 2001 under Classic does not have these stalls, of
course :).
>
> In Classic, you have a co-operatively multi-tasking model. If you decide
> not to "cooperate" you can grab the CPU and hog it until you are done. No
> nasty Task Manager to come around and throw you out of the shower because
> you're hogging all the hot water. If you don't mind the queue of yelling
> family members hopping from one foot to the other at the bathroom door, you
> can take your sweet time, and everyone else suffers.
This is true when you are booted in OS 9. When you are booted in OS X,
Classic is just another OS X process. As such, it CANNOT not cooperate
with other OS X processes, and consequently, Word 2001 under Classic
CANNOT "grab the CPU and hog it" any more than Classic as a whole can.
Yet Word 2001 under Classic is perfectly able to function without
these nasty stalls, even though technically it probably has access to
even less horsepower available than Word X does.
Simply put, I cannot find it acceptable that Word X performs so
sluggishly both compared to Word 2001 under Classic and to all other
OS X native apps. To me, this is a clear indication that there is
something intrinsically wrong with Word X itself.
> In a Cocoa app (native OS X) you can't get away with it.
Sorry, but technically speaking BOTH Cocoa apps and Carbon apps are
"native OS X". They just use different APIs. There should not be any
significant performance differences between a Carbon app and a Cocoa
app.
And the vast majority of OS X apps that I am referring to in this post
are Carbon apps. Yet none, other than Word X, have these stalls.
> > I'd respectfully suggest that, since Word is the only OS X app that
> > suffers from these stalls, it might have more to do with the way WORD
> > operates than with the responsiveness of Mac OS X.
>
> Sure: We're trying to be nice and not disadvantage other applications.
> Maybe we should have done what VPC did: let Word hog the CPU and make all
> the other applications look bad.
Again, check out BBEdit, Eudora, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. NONE of
these NATIVE OS X apps have such stalls, which are unique to Word X.
Yet NONE of these apps monopolize the CPU. They are all as
well-behaved as Word is. And they perform much better. No stalls.
>
> > As well, since, as I said, moving the mouse or typing a key on the
> > keyboard does "wake" Word up again BEFORE the end of the stall, it
> > seems to me that it is Word that is asleep at the wheel, not OS X.
>
> Duh! The Mouse is an OS X SYSTEM process, not a Word process. And it is
> (necessarily) one of the highest priority tasks there is. Moving the mouse
> does NOT wake Word up, it wakes up the *system*. Pierre, I told you this
> twice already. I love a reasoned debate as much as the next man, but when
> we have dealt with an issue, do me a favour: don't keep bringing it back and
> back and back just because you don't *like* the answer :-)
The answer needs to make sense first.
Very simply put:
1) Other native OS X apps: no stalls
2) Word X: stalls
As long as you don't have a reasonable explanation for this, I'll keep
asking for one.
>
> > Just trying to talk common sense here.
>
> I do wish you were :-) I do have other users on this newsgroup that are
> needing answers to problems they have right now :-)
It's up to you to decide what's the priority. But I don't think you
have provided any information that could lead me -- or anyone with
some common sense -- to consider this thread "closed".
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Sat, 20 Jul 2002
12:38:20 +0100, Steve Xylo <s...@nowhere.invalid>:
> Let me apologise for my somewhat intemperate remarks; I certainly don't
> want to get into a "religious" argument ;-)
And me for mine: I hate church :-)
> But it does strike me that
> Word should really not require that much horsepower if all I'm doing is
> typing text into a page. Until I start doing crazy things with tables,
> graphs and so on,
The simplistic answer is that whenever you add or subtract a character
anywhere within the document, Word completely recomputes the document to
ensure that it can display the result WYSIWYG. It has a lot more work to do
than TextEdit.
Whether you or I would consider that to be "useful work" or whether we would
consider that it needs to be done "right then" is another question.
We could indeed discuss that, but if we did, we would come up against the
fact that most users of Word are on Windows, and they have horsepower to
burn. Have a chat to me sometime about how *effing* ridiculous it is to put
a 2GHz processor on a desktop to do word-processing...
> why should it be any less responsive than TextEdit? I
> think that's what many people are wondering.
TextEdit is doing a lot less "work" on each character than Word is. And it
is a Cocoa app, which gives it a better shot at the processor and the OS.
And I guess its authors knew a bit more about where OS X was going to end up
when they built it than the authors of Word did :-)
I don't want to give the impression that Microsoft does not care about the
lack of responsiveness in Word: they do. They made big efforts to improve
it. But they ran out of people, money, and ultimately time. MS was under
really severe pressure to get Office v.X out of the door when they did. I
don't think any of the beta testers was happy with the line in the sand that
they picked, and I certainly wasn't. I wouldn't mind betting that none of
the programmers working on it thought it was ready either.
But in a large software company, when you get told to ship it on Tuesday the
17th because it's the chairman's birthday, or for some other compellingly
important business reason, you do...
> You know what? I'm a musician too. And iTunes is not responsible for
> music piracy.
Of course it isn't. People do that...
> In fact, iTunes lets me easily encode promotional bits of
> my work into mp3 and let other people hear it. So I'm afraid that's just
> a silly argument.
Well, on sober reflection, maybe it was :-)
However, I am afraid that most of the computers with CD burners in this
neighbourhood are whirring away duplicating music CDs. Another friend of
mine just ran off six copies of the same disk, one for each of her friends.
Maybe I am a bit old-fashioned in that regard, but I have purchased all of
my music. If I have any of yours, you got paid for that.
All the best
Pierre Igot
> > But it does strike me that
> > Word should really not require that much horsepower if all I'm doing is
> > typing text into a page. Until I start doing crazy things with tables,
> > graphs and so on,
>
> The simplistic answer is that whenever you add or subtract a character
> anywhere within the document, Word completely recomputes the document to
> ensure that it can display the result WYSIWYG. It has a lot more work to do
> than TextEdit.
The problem I see here is that Word has at least three modes that
represent three different degress of "WYSIWYGness": the Normal view
mode, the Page Layout view mode and the Print Preview. Of the three,
only the third one is a reliable representation of what's actually
going to get printed. The other two are MORE OR LESS reliable -- but
I've seen cases where everything appears to fit on 1 page in Page
Layout mode and Word still ended up printing a page 2 with nothing or
one line of text on it.
The Normal mode is NOT a WYSIWYG representation of the document. It's
a partial WYSIWYG, and this is "accepted" by the user because he
understands that:
1) sometimes things can be done more efficiently in a non-WYSIWYG
manner
2) more importantly, the fact that the Normal view mode is not pure
WYSIWYG means that it requires less computing power.
Because of 2), it is normal/reasonable for the user to have the
expectation that, while things might be a bit slow in Page Layout view
mode, they will be OK for "everyday typing" in Normal view mode.
The problem is that it is not the case at present, even on VERY FAST
G4 machines with GOBS of RAM (I have a G4/450 with 1 GIG of RAM - no
slouch even if it's 2,5 years old).
By comparison, Word 2001 under OS 9 on the same machine, or indeed
even under Classic under OS X is MUCH faster.
I think it is understable that statements that essentially amount to
"sorry, we did the best we could under the circumstances" are not
really satisfactory to the end user.
If Microsoft is unable to provide the user with a "typing" environment
that performs adequately under OS X, whereas all other apps are, I
think that it simply says a lot of the programming abilities of MS
developers.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I would have happy
traded a good amount of Word's overbloated feature set against having
a word processor that performs adequately under OS X. I say lose all
the "WordArt" and drawing/graphic/charting features that should NEVER
be used by anyone with a reasonable sense of what looks "professional"
in a document -- and devote more resources to the core functionality.
If Microsoft chooses to "dilute" their resources and budget by ever
expanding Word's feature set with features of doubtful interest and
quality instead of ensuring that it simply remains usable as a word
processor, then the end users are entitled to be unhappy about it and
to voice their disagreement.
Pierre
----
Pierre Igot
> > Word should really not require that much horsepower if all I'm doing is
> > typing text into a page. Until I start doing crazy things with tables,
> > graphs and so on,
>
> The simplistic answer is that whenever you add or subtract a character
> anywhere within the document, Word completely recomputes the document to
> ensure that it can display the result WYSIWYG. It has a lot more work to do
> than TextEdit.
The problem I see here is that Word has at least three modes that
represent three different degress of "WYSIWYGness": the Normal view
mode, the Page Layout view mode and the Print Preview. Of the three,
only the third one is a reliable representation of what's actually
going to get printed. The other two are MORE OR LESS reliable -- but
I've seen cases where everything appears to fit on 1 page in Page
Layout mode and Word still ended up printing a page 2 with nothing or
one line of text on it.
The Normal mode is NOT a WYSIWYG representation of the document. It's
a partial WYSIWYG, and this is "accepted" by the user because he
understands that:
1) sometimes things can be done more efficiently in a non-WYSIWYG
manner
2) more importantly, the fact that the Normal view mode is not pure
WYSIWYG means that it requires less computing power.
Because of 2), it is normal/reasonable for the user to have the
expectation that, while things might be a bit slow in Page Layout view
mode, they will be OK for "everyday typing" in Normal view mode.
The problem is that it is not the case at present, even on VERY FAST
G4 machines with GOBS of RAM (I have a G4/450 with 1 GIG of RAM - no
slouch even if it's 2,5 years old).
By comparison, Word 2001 under OS 9 on the same machine, or indeed
even under Classic under OS X is MUCH more responsive for basic typing
functionality.
I think it is understable that statements that essentially amount to
"sorry, we did the best we could under the circumstances" are not
really satisfactory to the end user.
If Microsoft is unable to provide the user with a "typing" environment
that performs adequately under OS X, whereas all other apps are, I
think that it simply says a lot of the programming abilities of MS
developers.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I would have happy
traded a good amount of Word's overbloated feature set against having
a word processor that performs adequately under OS X. I say lose all
the "WordArt" and drawing/graphic/charting features that should NEVER
be used by anyone with a reasonable sense of what looks "professional"
in a document -- and devote more resources to the core functionality.
If Microsoft chooses to "dilute" their resources and budget by ever
expanding Word's feature set with features of doubtful interest and
quality instead of ensuring that it simply remains usable as a word
processor, then the end users are entitled to be unhappy about it and
to voice their disagreement.
Pierre
----
Steve Xylo
appl...@applelust.com (Pierre Igot) wrote:
[snip]
> it is normal/reasonable for the user to have the
> expectation that, while things might be a bit slow in Page Layout view
> mode, they will be OK for "everyday typing" in Normal view mode.
>
> The problem is that it is not the case at present, even on VERY FAST
> G4 machines with GOBS of RAM (I have a G4/450 with 1 GIG of RAM - no
> slouch even if it's 2,5 years old).
Entirely agree. I work in Normal mode, and have all the
autocorrect/autoformat stuff turned off, and it still crawls on a G4/500
512Mb. That just ain't good enough.
S
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
I agree with Pierre absolutely (this time!) :-)
However, I just want you guys to check one thing: In
Preferences>View>Window, have you turned Live Word Count OFF? It's very
power hungry.
I say this because with a 560-page document open on my G4 667 TiBook, Word
is "does things" at about half the speed of my Pentium 1500: not
unacceptably slow. Sure, there are those pauses Pierre complains about, but
they are not a big bother to me (maybe he types faster than I do).
Hmmm... I just checked it and found that it had somehow got itself turned
back on on my system: I am not sure whether that was caused by my fiddling,
or a damaged preferences file (Microsoft Word Settings (10)).
There are some other power-hungry features you can turn off to speed things
up a bit.
If you can live without Quarts Text Smoothing, turn it off (use TinkerTool
to turn it off entirely).
Ensure that you have Tools>track Changes>Track Changes while Editing turned
OFF, and ensure the other two options are turned ON, so you can see if your
document has a large number of embedded tracked changes in it. A document
that has that will be very slow.
Check your document for tables. If the document has a lot of tables, and
the tables are more than a few pages, get into each table and
Table>Properties>Table>Options and turn "Automatically resize to fit
contents" OFF. It's another power guts.
Now go back to Word>Preferences and start turning these off:
View>Contact tags
General>Bckground repagination (you can turn this off only in Normal View,
it must be running in Page Layout View).
..Include formatted text on clipboard
..Provide feedback with animation
..WYSIWYG font and style menus
..Enable Quartz text smoothing
Edit>Enable Click and Type
Save>Always create backup copy ON
..Allow Fast Saves OFF
Spelling and Grammar>Check spelling as you type OFF
..Check grammar as you type OFF
Compatibility>Recommended Options for Microsoft Word 2000 - 2002 and X and
ensure the individual options are all OFF (this is a per document setting:
you need to check it on each document, it shouldn't be on this dialog,
shaddap Pierre...)
File Locations> Make sure your User Templates location points to where your
templates really are, not an alias.
In Tools>Hyphenate, turn off "Automatically hyphenate document" -- it's a
notorious power hog.
In Tools>Autocorrect, turn everything OFF. It causes continuous reparsing
as you type.
In Tools>Templates and Add-ins, check to see how many templates and add-ins
you are loading. Each one takes memory and slows Word down. Unload any you
do not need for the current document.
If you do Visual Basic development, don't leave the Visual Basic Development
Environment running while working normally :-)
If particular documents are slow, do a "Save all but last paragraph mark to
new file" cleanup on them. It is not unknown for documents from earlier
versions of Word to be carrying 10 or 20 megabytes of corrupt data hidden in
a stranded container within the document. Word can't see it to remove it,
but it seriously slows down the document.
Now, on my system, Word is fast enough with all of this stuff turned on
(except Click and Type) and I am working in a 500-page document.
But that's how to get Word lean mean and hungry.
Hope this helps
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Mon, 22 Jul 2002
20:06:17 +0100, Steve Xylo <s...@nowhere.invalid>:
Steve Xylo
"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
> However, I just want you guys to check one thing: In
> Preferences>View>Window, have you turned Live Word Count OFF? It's very
> power hungry.
Ah, but actually Live Word Count is my favourite feature ;-). Thanks for
all the other tips, though. I'll try them out.
Cheers,
Steve
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
Of course I am not suggesting you have to turn off stuff you are actually
using :-)
I think I am running with almost everything ON that I suggested could be
turned off. It's a matter of what you use.
I am sure you are aware of Tools>Word Count... on the menu. That does
pretty much the same thing and does not require that you run Live Word
Count. It has a couple of limitations: it's only accurate after the
document is saved, and it omits text in text boxes.
Just be aware that Live Word Count is death on a Laptop Battery: it keeps
the CPU gurgling at about 70 per cent even when you are doing nothing. Turn
it off and CPU load drops back to about 10 per cent.
Cheers
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Tue, 23 Jul 2002
10:41:06 +0100, Steve Xylo <s...@nowhere.invalid>:
Steve Xylo
"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
> I am sure you are aware of Tools>Word Count... on the menu. That does
> pretty much the same thing and does not require that you run Live Word
> Count. It has a couple of limitations: it's only accurate after the
> document is saved, and it omits text in text boxes.
???? Of course, I used to use word count in Word 98. Was it always the
case that it was only accurate after saving?!
> Just be aware that Live Word Count is death on a Laptop Battery: it keeps
> the CPU gurgling at about 70 per cent even when you are doing nothing. Turn
> it off and CPU load drops back to about 10 per cent.
Does Word really need to hog 70% of my CPU to do some simple addition
and subtraction? ;-)
Cheers,
Steve
John McGhie [MVP]
This responds to article <sx-DF70E2.10...@news.dial.pipex.com>,
from "Steve Xylo" <s...@nowhere.invalid> on 24/7/02 7:25 PM:
> ???? Of course, I used to use word count in Word 98. Was it always the
> case that it was only accurate after saving?!
Yes. In fact, it *was* the case that it was never really accurate at ALL
:-) Effectively it used to be "Text Range End - Text Range Start / 6". In
other words: "characters / 6". It's a bit more sophisticated these days :-)
Right after you save, it will be within a word or two of the "Live"
measurement.
>
>> Just be aware that Live Word Count is death on a Laptop Battery: it keeps
>> the CPU gurgling at about 70 per cent even when you are doing nothing. Turn
>> it off and CPU load drops back to about 10 per cent.
>
> Does Word really need to hog 70% of my CPU to do some simple addition
> and subtraction? ;-)
No, of course it doesn't :-) All it needs is a few microseconds every few
hundred milliseconds. All it's doing is kicking the pagination engine into
life to see if any more characters have arrived, and how many it has now. It
has to use the pagination engine because it then has to figure out how many
of those keystrokes that arrived were characters, and of those, how many are
going to be visible to the printer.
Unfortunately, OS X dishes out CPU time in large blocks, so Word uses its
three microseconds or whatever, then hands control back. OS X then sits in
a wait loop for 19.997 milliseconds or whatever, waiting to allocate the
next slice.
You notice the blurb in the Jaguar ad about "fine-grain task scheduling,
thread prioritisation, and smart memory model management..."? That, I
assume, is the fix. What they are saying is that OS 10.2 hands out time in
much smaller lumps and enables applications to set a very low priority on
some threads so they don't use so much resource.
Word is not actually "using" 70 per cent of the CPU, it's sitting in a
bloody wait loop doing nothing, but OS X is currently not allowing the
processor to throttle back because it "thinks" Word is doing something.
The reason Word Count has close to zero effect on Word's actual performance
(apart from making the Stalls worse) is that because it is Word's thread,
Word can interrupt it instantly when it gets something more important to do.
In Jaguar, presumably there will be a way to tell OS X this.
That should also cure the Stalls, which is where we came in to this show.
However, this time I think I will wait to see if they *have* fixed it before
I rush out and plonk my $229.00 (that's the price in Australia) on the
counter. I have two slightly used copies of OS 10.1.5 here if anyone's
interested... (And yes, I paid for them too: both of them!)
Hope this helps
--
Please post replies to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP: Word for Macintosh and Word for Windows
Consultant Technical Writer
<jo...@mcghie-information.com.au>
+61 4 1209 1410; Sydney, Australia: GMT + 10 hrs
Steve Xylo
In article <B964E4AB.1A175%jo...@mcghie-information.com.au>,
"John McGhie [MVP]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
> > ???? Of course, I used to use word count in Word 98. Was it always the
> > case that it was only accurate after saving?!
>
> Yes. In fact, it *was* the case that it was never really accurate at ALL
> :-) Effectively it used to be "Text Range End - Text Range Start / 6". In
> other words: "characters / 6". It's a bit more sophisticated these days :-)
LOL. I do some journalism; so I guess that if I wrote articles that used
a lot of long words to fool the word count I was actually earning a
slightly higher rate per word? ;-)
But this is interesting that it calculated characters/6. Why not just
count spaces while ignoring any string of spaces greater than or equal
to two?
Cheers,
Steve
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Fri, 26 Jul 2002
00:17:39 +0100, Steve Xylo <s...@nowhere.invalid>:
> > Yes. In fact, it *was* the case that it was never really accurate at ALL
> > :-) Effectively it used to be "Text Range End - Text Range Start / 6". In
> > other words: "characters / 6". It's a bit more sophisticated these days :-)
>
> LOL. I do some journalism; so I guess that if I wrote articles that used
> a lot of long words to fool the word count I was actually earning a
> slightly higher rate per word? ;-)
Sure were. Give me half the difference :-)
> But this is interesting that it calculated characters/6. Why not just
> count spaces while ignoring any string of spaces greater than or equal
> to two?
This becomes intensely complex. For example, in some Asian languages they
do not use spaces. In every language, what counts as a "space"? A colon?
A punctuation mark? Etc etc.
If you are up against a user who uses "spaces" to line things up, what do
you do? In Word, various occurrences of spaces are suppressed on output.
And then you have to paginate and then parse the entire file to work it out.
In the old days, you didn't have the CPU grunt or memory for that sort of
luxury. When this feature started, it was "file size in bytes less 500 over
6" for speed and efficiency. In other words, deduct the size of the fixed
file header and divide the rest by six. You can't do that these days,
because for example a header or footer appears in the file once but prints
1,500 times. Cross-references, includes: they can all replicate multiple
times while appearing in the file only once.
Every time Microsoft met a lawyer whose secretary pointed out that his word
count was inaccurate, they added more sophistication to the algorithm. Now,
Live Word Count is always almost exactly accurate, and after a full save, so
is Word Count. But it sure burns a lotta gas...
Steve Xylo
In article <e4r1ku8jo1mni9ms2...@4ax.com>,
"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:
> In the old days, you didn't have the CPU grunt or memory for that sort of
> luxury. When this feature started, it was "file size in bytes less 500 over
> 6" for speed and efficiency. In other words, deduct the size of the fixed
> file header and divide the rest by six. You can't do that these days,
> because for example a header or footer appears in the file once but prints
> 1,500 times. Cross-references, includes: they can all replicate multiple
> times while appearing in the file only once.
>
> Every time Microsoft met a lawyer whose secretary pointed out that his word
> count was inaccurate, they added more sophistication to the algorithm. Now,
> Live Word Count is always almost exactly accurate, and after a full save, so
> is Word Count. But it sure burns a lotta gas...
Thanks for the explanation. I find it interesting how these new features
tend to alter one's way of writing. Before live word count I generally
wrote about 50% more than my assignment required and then cut down to
length over numerous rewrites. Now with live word count I tend to
overwrite less in the first place, and maybe rewrite more during the
first draft. I'm not sure that's a good thing, though...
Cheers,
Steve
shu...@emirates.net.ae
page MSWord document with NO graphics.
Running iTunes in background makes it impossible to use.
And to close a document, one page takes up to a minute or two
as well.
I'll use anything but Word under these circumstances!
S Bennett
>-----Original Message-----
>I'd be interested to know on whether other people are
experiencing are
>experiencing what I will try to describe below.
>
>.
>
Jerry W. Perkins
<shu...@emirates.net.ae> wrote in message
news:202a01c242ff$108af0f0$3bef2ecf@TKMSFTNGXA10...