Microsoft Office 2004 Mail Merge Slow On Imac G5?

[CliffordBuetikofer]

Hardware: iMac G5 1.8GHz 512M RAM

I just installed Office 2004 (for some ungodly reason) and was trying to do a mail merge into a form using the "Data Merge Manager" with about 300 records from an Excel file.

It took over 11 minutes to sort the data by the last name column, which had a high cardinality. I ran top and the cpu was being hammered ranging from 80-99%. Is this normal performance behavior?

Also,I wanted to print to PDF, but the dialog box never came up. It sent all 300 pages to the printer.

Also, The preview function of the records did not render the data.

Even after the sort was done, with no activity, Office was still using the cpu from 80-100? Maybe some indexing from Spotlight?

ANy ways, is this another example of microsoft optimizing their code for their OS and get a poor port of OS X and should I contact Microsoft directly?

I wanted to see if the issue was common and not special to my install.

Thanks,
Cliff