Can I Safely and Easily Delete (non-English) Proofing Tools in Office2004?

[pendragon]

When first installing Office 2004, I inadvertently installed all
Proofing Tools, rather than just English.

Is there an easy way to safely and easily remove all non-English
proofing tools?

Would it be ok to just remove all the non-English files in the
Proofing Tools folder?

An additional approach I considered is trashing the Proofing Tools
folder and then doing a custom install from the Install CD? If that
would work, must I then reinstall all the incremental updaters?

Or, it this just a dumb idea and not worth the effort?

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

When first installing Office 2004, I inadvertently installed all
Proofing Tools, rather than just English.

Is there an easy way to safely and easily remove all non-English
proofing tools?

Would it be ok to just remove all the non-English files in the
Proofing Tools folder?

An additional approach I considered is trashing the Proofing Tools
folder and then doing a custom install from the Install CD? If that
would work, must I then reinstall all the incremental updaters?

Or, it this just a dumb idea and not worth the effort?

Yes you can, but why? You are not saving any significant amount of space,
and are jeopardizing the integrity of Office and perhaps confusing a future
Office update.

 

[CyberTaz]

Your best bet is to leave them right where they are The grand total disk
space occupied by the Proofing Tools folder is 110 MB. By today's standards
that isn't enough to make you sneeze if it were pepper. If you're that
desperately in need of disk space I'm sure there is quite a bit of "other
stuff" that could be removed/archived with far less likelihood of negative
consequences... I know that's how it is here

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[pendragon]

Yes you can, but why? You are not saving any significant amount of space,
and are jeopardizing the integrity of Office and perhaps confusing a future
Office update.

Bob,

Many thanks for the prompt and candid comments. They are most
appreciated, as is your time and expertise.

I really have no operative reasons to remove the proofing tools, well,
other than to save space, e.g., in Office 2004 the Proofing Tools use
110 MB. In Office 2008, where I only have the English Proofing tools,
the (same) folder is 11.6 MB.

Should I decide to remove the non-English Proofing Tools, do you
recommend deleting the entire folder and then doing a custom install,
or should I just remove the non-English files?

 

[Mickey Stevens]

I think you should be OK deleting the files directly from the Microsoft
Office 2004/Shared Applications/Proofing Tools folder. Keep all of the
English files as well as the US (or UK or Aus, depending on location)
English supplements.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Bob,

Many thanks for the prompt and candid comments. They are most
appreciated, as is your time and expertise.

I really have no operative reasons to remove the proofing tools, well,
other than to save space, e.g., in Office 2004 the Proofing Tools use
110 MB. In Office 2008, where I only have the English Proofing tools,
the (same) folder is 11.6 MB.

Should I decide to remove the non-English Proofing Tools, do you
recommend deleting the entire folder and then doing a custom install,
or should I just remove the non-English files?

I recommend doing nothing and just leaving them there.

 

[pendragon]

I recommend doing nothing and just leaving them there.

Indeed I value the thoughts here. Were that not the case, I would have
just bumbled along. Really, I am in your debt.

But now that I have been properly counseled, waddya think of this
approach?
1. Make a verified backup via SuperDuper.
2. Selectively remove the Proofing Tools as Mickey Stevens (above)
suggested.
3. Try to reinstall MS 11.5 Updater.
a). If the updater finds my Office 2004, then all should be OK. Or,
is that not necessarily true?
b). If the updater fails to find my Office 2004, fuggedaboudit and
revert to the backup.

Thanks again!

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Indeed I value the thoughts here. Were that not the case, I would have
just bumbled along. Really, I am in your debt.

But now that I have been properly counseled, waddya think of this
approach?
1. Make a verified backup via SuperDuper.
2. Selectively remove the Proofing Tools as Mickey Stevens (above)
suggested.
3. Try to reinstall MS 11.5 Updater.
a). If the updater finds my Office 2004, then all should be OK. Or,
is that not necessarily true?
b). If the updater fails to find my Office 2004, fuggedaboudit and
revert to the backup.

Thanks again!

I already told you what my opinion was. You'll save yourself a lot of grief
if you just forget they are there.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Recently someone *did* report that doing this caused problems with
spelling and grammar functions (maybe Tools | Language vanished?), which
were fixed when he put them back. That didn't make a whole lot of sense
to me, but I didn't investigate. Anyhow, it's worth trying if you do it
in such a way that you can roll back (as you described--I'd also just
zip and move the extra files temporarily for the test, not trash them).
Let us know the results, and be sure to test the proofing functions
before deciding it worked fine.

 

[pendragon]

Dalya,

Should I find the time, I may give it a go Monday, ensuring (of
course) I first have a fully verified backup and have archived the
files being removed.

But I am unsure of what I should do to properly test/ensure the
remaining proofing tools will subsequently work as designed.

Please, your thoughts…

TIA

 

[pendragon]

Daiya,

Should I find the time, I may give it a go Monday, ensuring (of
course) I first have a fully verified backup and have archived the
files being removed.

But I am unsure of what I should do to properly test/ensure the
remaining proofing tools work as designed.

Please, your thoughts…

TIA

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Oh. Just run a spell-check on a document via Tools | Spelling and
Grammar. And bring up Tools | Language and try assigning a language to
selected text (even if it's UK English), and then run another spellcheck
on it.

I believe the guy also said that he just simply put them back and all
was fine, rather than having to roll back to a backup. It's also
possible that his problem was caused by trying to eliminate UK and AUS
English in addition to the other languages--I think Word doesn't like that.

 

[pendragon]

Here’s what I did and the results of my experiment:

1. I made a verified backup via SuperDuper.
2. Moved all non-English Proofing Tools to a separate folder.
3. Tested Word as Daiya suggested. All went well.
4. Shut down & restarted.
5. Retested. Again all went well.
6. Quit all running apps and reinstalled the MS 11.5 Updater. That too
went well.
7. A new check of the Proofing Tools folder indicated that the 11.5
updater reinstalled the following languages (that were removed in step
2 above):

German Dictionary (post-reform)
German Dictionary (pre-reform)
German Hyph Dict (post-reform)
German Hyph Dict (pre-reform)
German Hyphenation
German Spelling
Italian Grammar
Spanish Dictionary
Spanish Hyphen Dictionary
Spanish Hyphenation
Spanish Spelling3
Swedish Grammar
Swedish Grammar Dictionary

8. Why these languages were reinstalled and the others not, I dunno.
9. A subsequent Repairing Permissions was without issue.
10. The net HD space saved was about 85 MB.
11. What gremlins lurk, that too I dunno.

Still, I hope my little experiment helps others.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

7. A new check of the Proofing Tools folder indicated that the 11.5
updater reinstalled the following languages (that were removed in step
2 above):

8. Why these languages were reinstalled and the others not, I dunno.

My guess would be that the 11.5 update included fixes to those
languages, and thus was designed to replace the old proofing tools with
new versions. Lord knows there are bugs in the language tools, but
that's just a guess.

Many thanks for sharing your results.