Will the speed of Mac PowerPoint ever increase?

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Steve Maser - 15 May 2006 20:31 GMT

Faculty member brought me his 124-slide presentation that has a
problem...

In Windows Office 2003 (all patches) -- viewing the slides in "slide
sorter" view takes about 3-5 seconds to display all the slides.

In Mac Office 2004 (all patches) -- it can take up to 3-4 *minutes*
before all the same slides are displayed -- and there are a lot of
"Spinning Pizza Of Death" wheels coming up while it chugs along here.

Macs used to test this have been G5 and Intel Macs with *lots* of RAM
running 1.4.6.

Why is there *still* this inherent speed different in the Mac version
of PowerPoint from the PC version?

- Steve

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googmeister@gmail.com - 15 May 2006 21:23 GMT

> Faculty member brought me his 124-slide presentation that has a
> problem...
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
> Why is there *still* this inherent speed different in the Mac version
> of PowerPoint from the PC version?

To be fair, I don't think MS has a universal binary version for
PowerPoint yet, so it is running in a simulator on the Macintel.

On the other hand, Mac PowerPoint is well known to be extremely
slow in slide sorter mode. It can also be extremely slow at
saving files. It's not a question of CPU or RAM. Hopefully
the MacOffice folks reading this newsgroup will be fixing
it soon.

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Jim Gordon - 16 May 2006 04:16 GMT

Hi Steve,

I think it is reasonable to expect a large speed increase for Intel
processor Macs when the dual binary comes out. That will be quite a
while, though.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

> Faculty member brought me his 124-slide presentation that has a
> problem...
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> - Steve

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Steve Maser - 16 May 2006 15:56 GMT

> Hi Steve,
>
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> -Jim Gordon
> Mac MVP

Sure -- I can understand that the Rosetta emulation is poor.

But on a dual-2.3G G5 desktop -- the current version of Office 2004's
"slide show" performance is terrible.

I'd like to think the next version of Powerpoint will be better, but
that's not helping my users at the moment...

- sTeve

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Corentin Cras-Méneur - 16 May 2006 17:13 GMT

> But on a dual-2.3G G5 desktop -- the current version of Office 2004's
> "slide show" performance is terrible.

Did you make the slides on a PC?? I found that if you have embedded OLE
objects and other "weird" types of graphics from the Windows side,
rendering speed is tremendously decreased (the formats have to be
"converted" on the Mac each time you want to display them and it takes
forever).

Corentin

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Steve Maser - 16 May 2006 17:28 GMT

> > But on a dual-2.3G G5 desktop -- the current version of Office 2004's
> > "slide show" performance is terrible.
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
>
> Corentin

I believe the faculty member in question with his slides only made them
on his Mac. I'd have to ask him about this.

The slides are chock full of "graphics", though -- it's not only pure
text.

But there's no "converting graphic" dialog that would indicate there's
any conversion going on.

- Steve

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Dave Fritzinger - 16 May 2006 18:12 GMT

> > > But on a dual-2.3G G5 desktop -- the current version of Office 2004's
> > > "slide show" performance is terrible.
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
> But there's no "converting graphic" dialog that would indicate there's
> any conversion going on.

I posted on this very subject a month ago or so. Indeed, I find things
so bad (even on a PM, dual 2 Gig) that I have purchased Keynote to run
on the MacBook Pro, since PP would be slowed down even more by the
requirement to translate everything for the intel processor. At least
Keynote is Universal.

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Dave Fritzinger
Honolulu, HI

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Corentin Cras-Méneur - 17 May 2006 17:49 GMT

> I believe the faculty member in question with his slides only made them
> on his Mac. I'd have to ask him about this.
>
> The slides are chock full of "graphics", though -- it's not only pure
> text.

I see... If the graphics are a simple copy and paste from Excel, you
have the Entire Excel spreadsheet embedded with it (for ediatability).
What I do now, is copy the graphic in Excel and past Special in PPT to
paste as Image.
I wonder whether he could Cut the graphic in PPT and paste special as
image to somehow eliminate the issue. Of course, yo loose the
editability of the graphic in the process...

> But there's no "converting graphic" dialog that would indicate there's
> any conversion going on.

That could be big and complex Excel charts then...

Corentin

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Steve Maser - 17 May 2006 20:20 GMT

> > I believe the faculty member in question with his slides only made them
> > on his Mac. I'd have to ask him about this.
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
>
> Corentin

There are no Excel graphics in the files. Most of the "graphics" are
.jpg pictures and other "drawn" graphics.

Nothing directly from Excel in either of the (many) files I have that
exhibit this problem.

- Steve

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Corentin Cras-Méneur - 18 May 2006 01:02 GMT

> There are no Excel graphics in the files. Most of the "graphics" are
> .jpg pictures and other "drawn" graphics.

:-\

Puzzling...
Are the pictures big ??? No point having pictures in huge resolution
when the PPT file is used for a presentation and that could slow down
PPT.
WIthout metadata conversion or Excel spreasheets embedded in the
presentation, I've never experienced what you describe. The last thing I
could think of would be data corruption with this file (or any related
file where some slides have been copied from one file to the other).

Corentin

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Mac Forum / Applications / PowerPoint / May 2006

Will the speed of Mac PowerPoint ever increase?