The heaviest benchmark that no MacBook can handle - Word, someone with a MBP 16" that could help?

[solouki]

No that sounds great actually, I can't even run the "go to page" on the air somehow.



No, I agree, this is a crazy small file for a computer to handle. Any modern computer should not break a sweat when opening a 900 page text file.. it's crazy, those files should fit on a floppy Word (in print view) does something that is super-not-optimized. Personally I prefer LaTeX, but it is not always possible to use that.

In the 3GPP example, Word is the only program that is allowed to use when editing the standards. They did some investigations years ago and found that some features in Open office didn't translate at all when the docs where opened with Word, so then Word "won". I was not part of this work and I surely would not have advocated for using Word instead of the open variants.. and the most used feature that the author's want from word is "track changes" and similar tools, and those are frankly pretty good in Word. But surely Libre Office should be equally good for that, and still let us open documents within seconds

Also, this behaviour has been around for years so it is not due to any online-editing-contact-thing. It's just a badly written software, when using Print view (the default view).

Thank you everyone for contributing here, I got a lot of info from your testing here. I'll continue to advocate that the "lightweight" users should get an Air for Office-work and switch to either Draft view (it is super quick, try it if you have Word) or use another editor such as Pages or Libre. Also, I'll maybe think about sending in a contribution to change from Word it is probably a non-winnable-battle, but maybe one can stir the pot a bit.

Hi Boomhowler,

Yes, TeX is wonderful and is employed for typesetting many scientific journals and technical monographs. I believe it is still the best at typesetting math. I started using Knuth's TeX before Lamport's LaTeX even existed, thus I wrote my own macro package for TeX before Lamport wrote his LaTeX macros, and I still use mine. In the 1990s I tried Word for mathematics because of the whole "standards" thing, but it was so bad, so difficult to write math, so slow, and ultimately crashed when the math became too much for it that I was more than happy to give up on Word and return to TeX.

And yes, I knew that OpenOffice didn't quite exactly translate/convert to Word documents...there would be minor problems, even after all of the Word fonts were loaded into OpenOffice, in this conversion. One could go back and correct these minor differences if one wished, but this didn't alleviate the fact that OpenOffice and Word did differ slightly. While OpenOffice still exists (last time I checked), I believe LibreOffice is now more frequently maintained and is more robust. It is the one to try on Word documents, in other words. I don't really do Word much at all, so I don't have much experience with Libreoffice, but Libreoffice does attempt to provide all of the features of Word. You might consider trying Libreoffice instead of OpenOffice.

As far as tracking changes (I'm not familiar with how Word or Libreoffice do this), I use software versioning programs to accomplish this. In particular, I use "git" and "subversion". Yes, these programs are designed to track computer code and modifications to that code, but "writings/manuals/monographs" are just another type of "code" and so git or subversion work extremely well in tracking all modifications, and their authors, to writing documents too. For instance, git follows a distributed database motif, meaning that the same database is on multiple machines (making for secure backups resistant to catastrophes, in other words) and thus is very efficient at distributing the modifications from a team of authors to all the others, and allows comments and remarks by the other authors to be heard before the final modification is accepted and incorporated into the final version of the document. [Git and subversion are used for some of the largest software development projects in existence, such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox/Mozilla browser. These databases provide a full history of the project back to the beginning of time, and have even been employed to study the dynamics of how large software projects are developed.]

Regards, and good luck,
Solouki

P.S. Boomhowler, after you read my earlier post I edited it to add more of a performance summary. I don't know if you have seen my edited summary which includes a percentage performance comparison.

 

[Boomhowler]

Hi Boomhowler,

...

As far as tracking changes (I'm not familiar with how Word or Libreoffice do this), I use software versioning programs to accomplish this. In particular, I use "git" and "subversion". Yes, these programs are designed to track computer code and modifications to that code, but "writings/manuals/monographs" are just another type of "code" and so git or subversion work extremely well in tracking all modifications, and their authors, to writing documents too. For instance, git follows a distributed database motif, meaning that the same database is on multiple machines (making for secure backups resistant to catastrophes, in other words) and thus is very efficient at distributing the modifications from a team of authors to all the others, and allows comments and remarks by the other authors to be heard before the final modification is accepted and incorporated into the final version of the document. [Git and subversion are used for some of the largest software development projects in existence, such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox/Mozilla browser. These databases provide a full history of the project back to the beginning of time, and have even been employed to study the dynamics of how large software projects are developed.]

Regards, and good luck,
Solouki

P.S. Boomhowler, after you read my earlier post I edited it to add more of a performance summary. I don't know if you have seen my edited summary which includes a percentage performance comparison.

Hi, yeah I 100% subscribe to the usage of git for text documents as well especially with the additions that tools such as Overleaf have added (which actually resembles Words way of in-line comments in the documents), but also "traditional" git tools such as Gitlab or Github web interfaces. It's just a very uphill struggle to try to convince the leading parties in 3GPP to switch the existing workflow from Word to something else. I think that the smaller the difference is, the better, so something like Libre Office would be a better solution.. or at least easier to sell but as it is now, at least 80% are Windows-only users and they have lots of other tools built around word that they use to create flow-charts etc so they are very entrenched in the Office ecosystem. Unfortunately.

Thanks a lot for the summary as well. I really don't know how word can be so bad at rendering the print view since it is so much faster in Libre office. As I said, I will be recommending my colleagues to skip Print view but it is extremely frustrating since that is the default view.

 

[Rimmsi]

I ran a test on my MBP Mid 2015 and Pages opened the document in 2 minutes, LibreOffice 1:20 scrolling to the last page. I use Catalina as my main OS. I also have Win10 installed via BootCamp and I have MS Office 2013 here. The document opened in 3:40, but scrolling using the trackpad was very bad.

 

[Boomhowler]

I ran a test on my MBP Mid 2015 and Pages opened the document in 2 minutes, LibreOffice 1:20 scrolling to the last page. I use Catalina as my main OS. I also have Win10 installed via BootCamp and I have MS Office 2013 here. The document opened in 3:40, but scrolling using the trackpad was very bad.

When you opened the document on Windows, did you see how long time it took before you could scroll to the last page (900-something)?

 

[Rimmsi]

The times shown include scrolling to the last page.

 

[Boomhowler]

Short update. I just received my MBP, Max, 16" (64 GB ram, 24 core gpu) yesterday and it is a very speedy beast. It managed to open the word document in 12 minutes, which is pretty nice compared to the other machines I've tried the same task with.. it's still about 11.99 minutes too slow, but it is at least in the right direction

 

[panzer06]

M1 Max 64GB and I could open the doc and scroll to the bottom (slowly) in just over 4 minutes but even after an hour the system was still sluggish when in word with occasional beach balls.

Note to self, stick to my 5-10 page Word docs.

 

[Boomhowler]

M1 Max 64GB and I could open the doc and scroll to the bottom (slowly) in just over 4 minutes but even after an hour the system was still sluggish when in word with occasional beach balls.

Note to self, stick to my 5-10 page Word docs.

You sure you could scroll down to p963 after only 4 minutes?

Yeah, even when the whole document has been "loaded", scrolling and typing is real slow.. it's just bad

 

[Sanpete]

Short update. I just received my MBP, Max, 16" (64 GB ram, 24 core gpu) yesterday and it is a very speedy beast. It managed to open the word document in 12 minutes, which is pretty nice compared to the other machines I've tried the same task with.. it's still about 11.99 minutes too slow, but it is at least in the right direction

Are you using the version of Office for M1 Macs or the version for Intel ones?

 

[Boomhowler]

Are you using the version of Office for M1 Macs or the version for Intel ones?

on the air and pro max, I'm using the "apple silicon" ones (looking in activity monitor, for example). And on the intel machines, I use the intel variant ofc.

v16.59, if that helps

 

[panzer06]

Are you using the version of Office for M1 Macs or the version for Intel ones?

How would I know?

 

[Sanpete]

How would I know?

One easy way is to open Activity Monitor while you're running an Office program and check CPU > Kind. If it says it's Intel, it's being run via Rosetta 2.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Oh my! I had no idea. So let me get this straight, this file loads in Word under Windows on a PC in 30+ minutes, while the same file loads in Libreoffice under macOS on M1 and M1 Max Macs in around 6 seconds?! And scrolls smoothly through all 966 pages is seconds on the M1/M1 Max also. Whoa!

Why is Word so, so slow? Is it because MS does not have any competition for Word in the business world and thus haven't developed its performance? Why would anyone stick with Word when Libreoffice is between two and three orders of magnitude faster? It would seem that it would behoove one to transfer his/her docx from Word to Libreoffice in order to achieve this tremendous performance gain. [An analogous performance comparison would be to use an abacus at the grocery store compared to the laser SKU scanner to add up your purchases.]

I'm surprised -- and thanks for the information, I really appreciate it.

Solouki

In the corporate space Microsoft has a strangle-hold!
Once the OS gets there from the end laptop (licenses for Windows inclusive), then on Servers (on-premises yet most are fully in cloud) along with desktop or notebook management via Active Directory and Azure services there really hasn't been a good competitor since Word Perfect.

You also need to heavily consider apps licensed like Adobe Acrobat Professional which converts MS Office suite of docs (Word powerpoint emails and excel) into PDFs that can be edited annotated etc and the plethora of Excel Add-ins it's really hard to shake up industries. Formatting without issues rendering on other apps is crucial to get any start in overtaking Word in corporations.

I wonder if somewhere in the document there are some Word specific features being used that are not triggered when opened in other editors that only support a subset of Word features. Sort of like when you open a Powerpoint presentation in Google Slides and lose a lot of the animation features.

Bingo.
Could be macros could be formatting etc.

 

[solouki]

In the corporate space Microsoft has a strangle-hold!
Once the OS gets there from the end laptop (licenses for Windows inclusive), then on Servers (on-premises yet most are fully in cloud) along with desktop or notebook management via Active Directory and Azure services there really hasn't been a good competitor since Word Perfect.

You also need to heavily consider apps licensed like Adobe Acrobat Professional which converts MS Office suite of docs (Word powerpoint emails and excel) into PDFs that can be edited annotated etc and the plethora of Excel Add-ins it's really hard to shake up industries. Formatting without issues rendering on other apps is crucial to get any start in overtaking Word in corporations.


Bingo.
Could be macros could be formatting etc.

Hi DeepIn2U,

Yes, I think I understand this, and I've known about this stranglehold for a long time -- I even attempted in the 1990s to convert my own writings to MS Word in an effort to follow the business standardization bandwagon. But Word failed so badly, and so early, on mathematics in those days I went back to what I was using, and those tools, that I have been using ever since, have progressed nicely in performance in the years since the 1990s. I sort of assumed that Word had also undergone the same performance progression, but I hadn't kept up with what Word was doing since I was in the Unix/Linux world running on workstations/PCs before transferring my writings to Apple running its own flavor of *nix (mach, Debian, ...) but still allowing me to continue with my same writing tools.

This thread was my awakening to the fact that Word had apparently not actually kept up with the performance progression of other tools over the last two dozen years. In my opinion, it is unconscionable for a company to have a piece of software that takes 30+ minutes on an HP PC to fully open a fairly small document with only a few fonts, very little math, only a few figures, etc., in today's world, while this same small document opens fully in competing software in under 10 seconds. Yes, maybe the competitors don't render the document in precisely identical fashion, but at what point does one give up on a tool that takes 30+ minutes versus a nearly identical tool that take 10 seconds? Here you don't even have to change the source, you can continue with the same docx source, just use a much faster tool (that is also open source to boot). It just seems to me that at some point one would make the decision to switch to a tool that is between two and three orders of magnitude faster, especially since you wouldn't even have to expend any time or resources translating the source to a new format. When does that time occur?

Thanks,
Solouki

P.S. I believe that many times a person/business cannot easily transfer from one tool set to a better tool set because the source itself would have to be converted to a new format, as you point out, and this conversion is prohibitively expensive in time and resource expenditures. For instance, I would have a hard time converting my own writings to a new set of tools requiring a different source format, but I've been fortunate that the tools I've been using for over three decades has, over those years, kept up with the performance gains anticipated by the general hardware and software performance gains. I'm just a little surprised that Word/Excel/etc. has apparently fallen behind other competing software packages, performance-wise, on the exactly the same source material -- this is still hard for me to believe, but apparently has been verified by multiple earlier postings.