Office 2007 Quirks..

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Edd

Member
I have noticed a couple of things using office 2007 as my only microsoft product running on my mac.

1st. Files saves take a really long time.. not minutes, but much longer than reasonable.. 15 seconds to resave an excel 1Mb spreadsheet. My files are all hosted on my mac drive, and accessed by office (my documents = mac documents| desktop = desktop | etc.), so i understand that i could speed this up but hosting these things on the windows drive, but then there's an extra step to get them onto my mac (for back-up, emailing, quicklook) for when parallels isn't running.

2nd. With my mac completely shared, as described above, I notice that sometimes when moving cells around in a spreadsheet an error persists "Cannot empty the clipboard." Has anyone noticed this? I know this is a knowledgebase article for office 2003 from microsoft, but I'm wondering if having the clipboard shared between oses is creating this issue. I haven't used word nearly as much so can't comment if this error pops up there too.

3rd. Virtual memory reallocation happens a lot. I get this bubble in the bottle left corner (I run coherence with the taskbar hidden) saying that windows is resizing the paging file to create more virtual memory, and things maybe temporarily unresponsive. I used to (when I was a PC guy) set my paging file to twice the RAM installed in the PC, and did this in previous VMs under parallels, but I read an article showing the comparison of parallels/fusion/vista/xp in office tasks (among others). They have my macbook pro with my RAM and the VM screamed in Leopard. I emailed them and they said they allocated 2Gb ram to the VM, and left all other settings as default. I redid my VM (format/reinstall/etc) and it screams too. So I'm unwilling to do my old PC tricks.

Should I allocate more than 1Gb RAM to my VM? (there's 4gb in my computer) I run CS3 and a java intensive application alongside random mac stuff whilst using my VM and it's all working rather well. Would adding more RAM alter the frequency of automatic paging file resizing?

4th. I get the message occasionally that my video memory is low. I've given 32Mb and never seen any screen effects after this message, so anyone know what's going on?

Thanks

Edd
 
I also noticed that now Excel spits out an error looking for solver.xlam.

It looking for it in .psf/<my mac's documents folder>

I've tried removing and adding it back, but still solver is now non-functional. I guess hindsight says I should have installed my excel addins before sharing the my documents between OSes.

Anyone else?
 
Also, when you hit the Alt key and Office 2007 show the letter for each grouping in the ribbon, these are actually being processed as full-blown windows by Parallels (not sure exactly what they are in MS windows) which makes it really, really slow. It also confuses any windows tools like Witch or DragThing.
In general, Office 2007 seems to use a lot of GUI stuff, which bogs down Parallels (may be related to video memory issue). I have now started using NeoOffice to view when possible to reduce the number of Office 2007 stuff running.
d
 
An update a year later

So I just upgraded my VM to a demo of Parallels 4, and all this quirks are still around. The work around I've come up with for solver was to turn off the shared profile feature. I could either turn off shared profiles or reinstall solver (6 click process) every time I fired up excel.

I still get the 'can't empty clipboard' and it has nothing to do with a secondary clipboard manager

I haven't got the Virtual or video memory low notices yet, but have allocated quite a bit to them in the configuration.

I miss not being able to use the right apple key (on my macbook pro) as the content menu in windows, but I haven't delved into the settings for 4 enough to see if I can turn that off.

Any fixes for the solver and clipboard issues on the roadmap?
 
Same here

Out of the blue, I just strated getting this error too. I have made no major changes--running Excel 2007 on Parallels 4.0.3540.

Would love a solution other than rebooting!
 
What worked for me:

Disable parallels clipboard sync
Disable office multiple clipboards
Reboot

Apparently once the bug gets going, it will persist until a full reboot even if you disable the clipboard sync or office multiple clipboards.

Jeremy
 
IO started to notice this recently, but not before, and assume this is due to the latest patch from Parallels? Or from MS, more likely, since that timing seems more accurate.
 
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