Microsoft Word Very Slo-o-o-o-ow
 

I'm using Microsoft Word v.X with the SP1 Service Pack and the 10.1.2 update both applied. (Yes, I have re-installed from the original CD-ROM.) I'm running under Jaguar on a flat-panel G4 iMac.

It usually takes between 60 and 90 seconds to open a new (very short) document. Even switching between two open documents can take 30 seconds or more. No exotic diagrams, fonts, layouts, or anything... just correspondence and short reports.

It has never crashed (like some here have reported), but I'm getting very VERY tired of the spinning lollipop.

Other than throwing insults at Redmond and Bill Gates, does anyone have any idea of what could be happening here? AppleWorks isn't an option since I rely heavily on tables and such that MacLinkPlus turns into hash. And I shouldn't have to deal with OpenOffice, since I *paid* for Microsoft Office!

Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks!

[stab in the dark] Have you tried reducing the number of fonts installed, both in classic and X? [/stab in the dark]

I hate to admit this... but, since I switched to OS X, I haven't paid the least bit of attention to font management. I'm not even sure where fonts LIVE any more!

I know the font menus are awfully long... I haven't installed any myself, but Office seemed to go a bit wild with them. Let me go rummage.

(I haven't run Classic in months... could that still be a factor?)

checkers
 

see if automatic spell & grammar checkers are on... for me, grammar checker slows things down quite a bit.

-jesse

Turned off spelling and grammar checkers. Ripped out fonts by the double handful. (And, yes, it appears that OS X looks into the Classic System Folder for fonts!)

Still excruciatingly slow. Any other ideas?

Re: Microsoft Word Very Slo-o-o-o-ow
 

I beleive it is time for this:
How much RAM do you have? Is it only word that is misbehaving?

768 meg of RAM, 800 MHz G4. Nothing but Word is misbehaving. Even the other components of Office are happy as clams.

user account
 

Have you tried creating another user account (preferably an admin account) and seeing whether word still misbehaves? The reason I'm suggesting this is that it may be some form of conflict with something else you have running as part of your normal installation. Of course, if you have some third party extra installed system wide that's causing the problem this procedure is unlikely to tell you anything but it might be worth giving it a try.

I believe you have mistakenly purchased a copy of Microsoft Turd which, unfortunately, through a process experts refer to as "Bad Programming," has rendered itself unusable.

You may wish to remove the offensive document known as Normal from your /Applications/Microsoft Office X/Templates folder and place it to one side. Then relaunch Turd and see what happens. Alternatively, you may wish to delete--or merely place in a spot you can get to again -- the ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10) file and then relaunch Turd.

You should be aware that once these files are no longer present in their respective folders, Turd will have an immediate identity crisis and will begin asking you if it can get a tattoo, color its hair purple and begin dating a musician. Please be firm since software, when coddled, tends to take advantage of people.

:D Good stuff!

What about running some maitenance on your system? Repairing Permissions etc? I was having problems with Entourage running painfully slow, and that seemed to fix the problem.

Repairing permissions didn't find anything.

I set up a new Admin account, and Word is still painfully slow over there.

Running out of ideas...

Did you start Word up without the Normal template? Word will create a new instance of that file, but you'll lose some customization. However you just might get that speed increase you were seeking. Try it--if you have a highly-customized Word environment you can always put the file back.

Also, Word has been know to choke on fonts. if you have a ton of fonts and some conflict or are corrupt, that may also contribute to the problem.

Ok, so that tells us that it probably isn't anything to do with your normal installation; i.e. not a conflict with anything that runs as a part of normal user account.

Do you have any system wide third party items? For example, I have a number of system wide Preference Panes (in /Library/Preference Panes) including APE Manager.prefPane, AquaMon.prefPane, C-Pen 10 Settings.prefPane, Little Snitch.prefPane, PowerMate.prefPane, and USB Overdrive X.prefPane.

I also have a number of items in /Library/Startup Items including AquaMon, DoubleCommand, LittleSnitch, and NetBarrier.

Is there anything in any of these folders, or anywhere else for that matter, that runs on a system wide basis that might be conflicting with Word?

As far as I can tell, the only third-party utility running in the background is Kensington MouseWorks (needed for my trackball)... it's a prefPane. I downloaded the most recent version (December 2002) to make sure I wasn't running something incompatible with Jaguar.

I don't have any of the other things... unlike earlier Systems, I'm trying to live with the factory distribution of OS X rather than cluttering things up with INITs (or the modern equivalent).

Sigh... I appreciate all the suggestions. But Word is still outpaced by Electric Pencil 1.0 running on a TRS-80.

Turn off "provide feedback with sound" option in the preferences/general. It did wonders for me. All the other stuff only provided negligible speed increases.

i'd repeat the suggestion to move the "Normal" template out of its current location to the desktop, forcing Word to rebuild it.

do a Finder search on files with the exact name of "Normal", so you can be sure you move all of them, thereby getting the one Word is using.

FWIW, Word runs with excellent speed on my 10.2.4 system.

Word in 10.2.4
 

Hmmm. I have a G4 MDD and Word runs respectfully well - other than unexplained crashes while it is inactive. I tried the click and drag between docs that is causing you problems and while it isn't up to PC speed, it is just behind it. After opening the first file, which IS slow, all subsequent files are quick.

Are you running any external hard drives? (Doesn't matter if you are going to those drives for files or not).

Same Exact Problem! Took Everyone's Advice.
 

First day for me in the forums...

I've been scouring the Apple and Microsoft sites for a clue to this problem, but no-one is coming up with anything but "reinstall everything..." After looking at the posts here - I saw some good, logical suggestions and decided to try one more time... Thanks to you all, I achieved a significant improvement in Word's performance. This was my process.

1) Delete the "Normal" Template in Word (for now). It can be found in:
• Applications(osX) -> Microsoft Office (v.X) -> Templates

2) Look for extra fonts in several folders in OSX, depending on how you have your system configured. I found fonts in all these places. I'm not sure how they are managed - but there were a lot. I noticed that I installed a lot of Asian font sets from Apple.
• HD -> Library -> Fonts
• System -> Library -> Fonts
• Users -> UserFolder -> Library -> Fonts
• System9 Folder -> Fonts
• Applications(osX) -> Microsoft Office (v.X) -> Office -> Fonts

3) Now that "Normal" is gone & fonts are out of all these active areas, Restart your machine. Things will improve a bit, I'm sure, but keep working at it and checking back here until they are perfect.

Good luck!

Ummm, hello? Turn off the sound effects. I guarantee you'll see an improvement in performance.

i just went through this exact same problem with
Word 10.1.5 running suddenly very slooooowly.

Interestingly running Word from a different user account (guest, for example), was perfectly fine. This is the main clue to the problem.

Turns out that Word is highly sensitive to problems in the Entourage mail database. This seeems to cause the slowdown (WHY Word is dependent on the Entourage databse is beyond me - ask MS why they have created this dependence!!!).

To confirm it is the Entourage database causing the problem, first quit Entourage. Then remove the offending account folder from ~/Documents/Microsoft Office User Data/Office X Identities temporarily (drag it to the desktop), then relaunch Entourage. Entourage will automatically recreate a "Main identity" folder in the "Office X Identities" folder, and you will find Word will suddenly become much more responsive again. A rebuild seems to fix this problem.

Another thing to consider... MSOfficeX runs a search throughout your network for duplicate copies of itself running on another computer. This prevents two computers from running the same copy of OfficeX at the same time.

Is there any reason for MXOfficeX to have a problem conducting the network search which is causing it to hang and slow things down?

That's weird. But I offloaded my entire Entourage folder to another hard disk, emptied the trash, and Word runs as fast as I could hope for!

That's just WEIRD.

But thanks!!!

One more problem that slows Word v.X down hugely at launch - Adobe Acrobat 5.0 installs a file called pdamaker.dot into the Word folder inside the MS Office/Office/Startup folder. Removing this file also greatly speeds up the startup of Word. As far as I can tell, it is totally redundant under OS X anyway - probably was developed for Office 2001.