Mac Forum / Applications / MS Office / May 2008

We've had SP1 for a bit now, and I was wondering how it's treating
everyone.

For me, all the apps seem much more stable once they are up and
running, but getting them there (i.e., launching them) still seems to
take longer than it should: Excel is the fastest, Word is the slowest,
with PowerPoint in the middle (don't use Entourage). Relaunching seems
to take less time than initial launch, but the speed at which relaunch
happens seems to vary greatly for no reason (but faster than pre-SP1).
Word (my mainstay) seems to appear on the screen faster than it did,
but there is still a lag before I can actually type in a document. On
the technical side, I'm still getting the CGBitmapContextGetData error
in the console when running Word (a problem which seems to be specific
to MBP's running Nvidia GPUs -- or at least, that's my impression),
and I was wondering if this is a problem waiting for Apple to release
10.5.3, or a problem that won't be fixed until SP2. Overall, Office
2008 is much more usable than it was pre-SP1, but my eye still keeps
wandering to other office productivity solutions (despite my need for
real Office compatibility). Here's hoping for some quick fixes with
10.5.3; if the launch speeds were improved, I'd be a happy Office user
once again.

Doug