I'm new to Office X. I was just wondering if there were any solutions to
speeding up Word. When ever I select a paragraph, for example, the little
spinning rainbow ball starts spinning. I have to wait for it to finish
spinning.
I have a G4 500mhz with 500 megs of ram and the newest OS X. Also, I ran all
the updates to Office.
Matt
Hi Matt,
First, did you update all the way to Office X 10.1.4 (after updating to
10.1.2, which you have to do first)? If not, I recommend a complete
removal/reinstall as follows:
The Remove Office tool is located in the Value Pack folder on the Office X
CD. Install it and run it. Also don't forget to install any Value Pack
items you need. Now reinstall Office X using the installer on the CD or do
a Drag & Drop to the Applications folder. When you've finished, you'll need
to download (<
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/>) and install the
Office X 10.1.2 & 10.1.4 updaters. Then run Disk Utility First Aid to
repair permissions: Go to Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities; open up Disk
Utility; select your hard disk and click the First Aid tab and then the
button to "Repair Disk Permissions".
If you did update correctly, then first try repairing disk permissions as
explained above and reboot.
If you're still not seeing improvement, there could be a lot of causes and
you'll find some previous posts below that may help:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ File corruption:
I would also add the Carbon Registration Database to the list. The first
launch will then take longer since the database of Office apps will have to be
rebuilt then, but it usually helps a lot.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Acrobat conflict:
Acrobat installs a toolbar extension into each of the Startup folders for
Word, PowerPoint, and Excel:
Macintosh HD:Applications:Microsoft Office X:Office:Startup
You can trash them without ill-effect to Acrobat and positive effect for
Office (the application speeds back up). If you have Acrobat and OSX, you
don't need these redundant tools, since you can use OSX Printer Services to
call up Acrobat to print (that is, "save") files as PDF.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Extensis conflict:
The conflict is caused by an interaction with Extensis Suitcase 10.2. When I
launch Word the first time after booting up, it takes maybe 90 seconds of
watching the spinning wheel before it opens a new document. What it's doing (I
think) is searching the hard drive once for each font it thinks it needs for a
blank new document.
The fix is to open the Suitcase window, turn off all but the system fonts,
launch Word, wait......... and when it finally comes up, see which fonts have
been auto-activated (marked with a yellow diamond icon). Option click those to
permanently activate them, and the next time word launches after a reboot, it
come up in 5 seconds. It seems to take roughly 10 seconds more for each font
it wants to auto activate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ General suggestions for speeding up Word:
1) Work in Normal View as much as you can. This is a power-saving mode and
makes things a lot quicker.
2) Turn OFF all the Automatic crap in Tools>Autocorrect. Most of them create
more troubles than they cure anyway.
3) Give careful consideration to your Preferences>Save>AutoRecovery Save
interval. The shorter the interval, the more frequently you will be
interrupted: the longer the interval, the more data you stand to lose if you
get a crash.
4) Turn Preferences>Save>"Allow Fast Saves" OFF and "Always make backup" ON.
If you have done an upgrade install, these two may be set incorrectly. Fast
Saves causes documents to corrupt on modern file systems. Always make Backup
is essential: Word X crashes quite a bit. Note: If you have not saved the
document, there will be no backup, so get in the habit of saving a document
before you type anything in it, and then every time you stop to think.
5) Turn of Automatic Spelling and Grammar and Wordcount if you are not using
them. Dynamic Word Count is rather hungry and particularly useless unless you
are a lawyer filing court papers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I hope something here helps.
--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP
Mac Word FAQ: <
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>
