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[Office] Move the Microsoft User Data folder

M

Muggsy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 8, 2013
19
0
Hi everyone

After having browsed the net for a while I am surprised to see that no proper solution has been given to this issue!

Context:
Microsoft Office saves a couple of things in a folder called Microsoft User Data located in Documents. Now considering that the latter is usually THE place where we have our personal stuff, it is very frustrating to have a useless thing polluting the visual space.

My problem concerns Office 2008, but it seems (as seen around the net and in this MacRumors thread) that two solutions exist for some versions of Office/Mac:
1/ to move it to Users/ (YOUR USER NAME)/Library/Preferences/
2/ to create a symbolic link which will link everything to a new location

The solution 1 does not work in my case, as there is simply not such a place; the problem I see with symlinks is that it will still take a space in Document.

Does anyone managed to move this folder???
Thanks a lot in advance!
:):):):)
 
Muggsy said:
My problem concerns Office 2008, but it seems (as seen around the net and in this MacRumors thread) that two solutions exist for some versions of Office/Mac:
1/ to move it to Users/ (YOUR USER NAME)/Library/Preferences/
2/ to create a symbolic link which will link everything to a new location

The solution 1 does not work in my case, as there is simply not such a place;
Click to expand...

The good news: that last quoted statement is absolutely, incontrovertibly, 1000% certainly not true. You do do have such a place! All Macs, every single one, has that folder. If you do not see it, you are simply looking in the wrong Library folder. Your Mac has at least 3 Library folders. Be sure that you are in the Home folder, the one with your User Name, the one with the little white house icon. I guarantee that you will find that Preferences folder in there. It has to be there, it must be there, it IS there.
 
The user's "Library" folder is hidden by default in 10.7 Lion or later.

To get inside it, open the "Go" menu and type the following:

~/Library/

And press "Go".

One word of warning. DO NOT move the "Microsoft User Data" folder whilst ANY Microsoft Office applications are running.

I had a lot of users do this to find they had a problem with Entourage and move the folder back to it's original folder, only to have Entourage completely wipe out mailboxes, believing that since the index was previously empty (or not there) that the database should be too - stupid logic, Microsoft. I don't know if that has since been fixed, but it was certainly a problem in 2001, Office X and 2004.

My advice, is to simple live with it in the default location. It really shouldn't be a concern.
 
Thanks a lot!
The Library folder was indeed hidden.
I managed to move MUD and everything seems to work fine!
:):):):):)
 
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