Type of Article: MacTech Reviews

Some Speed You Can’t Stopwatch

MacTech’s tests are primarily done using a stopwatch, and as such, they are timing things that are done solely by the computer. This is a good judge of the difference between Office 2011 vs. 2008/4. In addition to stopwatch speed, Office 2011 has streamlined the steps for many activities. For example, as we mentioned, charting in Excel takes fewer steps than both 2008 and 2004. WordArt is another example.

Microsoft Office Graphics: Specifics

As with Office 2008 and 2004, Office 2011 relies on a common graphics library that is used across the Office suite. With that in mind, we tested some of the graphics functions to see how they fared, including:

• Inserting a large JPG
  
• Inserting a large EPS
  
• Importing a number of pictures into ClipArt

In short, for these types of actions, Office 2011 was basically on par with 2008 (sometimes a bit faster, other times a bit slower).

Microsoft PowerPoint: Specifics

PowerPoint has often been the Office application that lagged in performance. Once again, like the other applications in Office 2011, PowerPoint 2011 took significant strides in performance. In particular with launching, opening files, saving files, and applying templates that are the most frequently done and important items. A couple of things were slower, like scrolling (which may be intentional) and adding large quantities of slides.

Microsoft Word: Specifics

Clearly, Word is the most used application in the Office Suite. Overall, the application is snappier. Specifically, however, we wanted to see how the application launched, opened and saved files, and did some of the more intensive activities.

As you can see from Figure 3, Word 2011 is faster in particular on the native XML file formats (.docx). The documents used for the test were real world sized, but on the larger side so that we could get quality test results.