Will Microsoft Office run on Intel Macs at a usable speed?

For readers who are not already familiar with the "Rosetta" translator that allows programs written for a PowerPC-based Mac to run on an Intel-based Mac, it may be worthwhile to first read the answer to "What is Rosetta? What does it support?" elsewhere in the "Macintel" Q&A.

On Microsoft's Mactopia website, the company answers "Will Office for Mac and Messenger for Mac run on the Intel-based Macs?" with the following:

Yes. The Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit tested both programs on Intel-based Macs running Rosetta, and the programs run well in that configuration. Rosetta is software that is included with every Intel-based Mac and works behind the scenes to make sure that your existing software runs on the Intel-based Mac. You do not need to set up or configure Rosetta to use either Office 2004 or Messenger for Mac.

Although "usable speed" is certainly subjective, productivity applications like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel generally perform quite well under the "Rosetta" environment.

In a review of the Intel-based MacBook Pro, MacWorld notes that:

Although several of the bread-and-butter applications we used aren't currently available in Universal versions, we rarely perceived any serious slowness in those applications. Occasionally Microsoft Entourage got a bit poky, and Microsoft Word seemed somewhat confused when we tried to use the MacBook Pro's Scrolling Trackpad feature. But generally, applications running under Mac OS X's Rosetta code-translation technology, which converts instructions meant for PowerPC processors into those suitable for Intel chips, worked quite well.

In a review of the Intel-based iMac "Core Duo", MacInTouch [no longer online] concurred that:

We've been pleasantly surprised - we depend on workhorses such as Microsoft Office, FileMaker Pro and Dreamweaver for our daily work. Though they are not quite as fast as on the G5, all of these applications perform acceptably. We think Rosetta will get business users through the transition period without too much trouble.

MacTech also has provided an amazingly in-depth article covering the performance of the software suite running under "Rosetta" that you may wish to read.

In summary, yes, Microsoft Office should run under "Rosetta" at a "usable speed" on Intel-based Macs.

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