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Microsoft Word has become unbearable. Help.

B

bellis1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 9, 2003
277
24
Recently, my microsoft word has become unbearable. Perhaps it was always unbearable and I have just not used it in a long time. But, I am being forced to use it to put together my dissertation. My problems are:

1. It crashes at least twice a day. It just hangs and will not respond and then I have to force quit the application.

2. It is crazy slow when I go to open a file. It hangs for what seems like a minute before the dialog box appears for me to browse for a file to open. I often think that is hung up but if you wait long enough it finally responds. It is only when that dialog box comes up and not if I open a file from finder or most recent file from menu

3. Yesterday I had a crazy kernel crash that locked up the computer when I was tyring to print from word. When the crash happened text detailing the kernel panic was imposed directly on top of all my other working windows.


- Any ideas what might be going on? There is never a crash log when I look in console. I have Word 11.1 and it is up to date and I have the most recent Tiger software updates. I have 1gb of memory on an imac g5. I can post what I find in the system log if someone knows how to interpret it. For instance today, around the time of the first crash I have:

kernel[0]: USBF: 44900. 70 AppleUSBEHCI[0x224a800]::linkInterruptEndpoint(0x22bbb00) - _logicalNext is not NULL! (0x22bb540)

Thanks.
 
Do note that what Qzak suggested won't encompass what Eva suggested, so you'll have to do them separately... :(

To delete prefernences, you want to delete the respective files in the

/users/(you)/library/preferences/

folder that have filenames like com.microsoft.word.plist, and then also the files in

/users/(you)/library/preferences/microsoft/

that have filenames like com.microsoft.word.prefs.plist.
 
Simular things happend to me. I had to remove MS Office and reinstal. It really is a good program, at least for me. But at some point it just started to hang up. I couldn't access the Drwaing Toolbar, and it just got worse.
 
Thanks

I'm not sure why I just didn't try to reinstall it yet. I'll go ahead and do that. It is good to hear that others have had similar problems and a reinstall fixed it. Thanks.
 
Eniregnat said:
Simular things happend to me. I had to remove MS Office and reinstal. It really is a good program, at least for me. But at some point it just started to hang up. I couldn't access the Drwaing Toolbar, and it just got worse.
Click to expand...
It's Microsoft, man! What did you expect? You should consider yourself lucky that it didn't force you to reinstall OS X! :D
 
Keep in mind that there are a number of excellent word processors out there. For academic purposes, I've been using Redler's Mellel, which has some fairly intuitive footnote/endnote functions, as well as some nice outline and styles features. It's also really light and doesn't flinch under hundreds of pages.

If you're getting frustrated with the bloat of Word, I'd recommend you check it out.
 
I had a similar problem with Office X and was advised to delete the template "Normal". Word automatically recreates this when started. Can be found in applications/microsoft office x/templates.
 
Soulstorm said:
It's Microsoft, man! What did you expect? You should consider yourself lucky that it didn't force you to reinstall OS X! :D
Click to expand...

It's really quite a nice product. Nisus writer would be my second choice, but I have to use macros provided for both my work and for school(my slow journey).
 
Sorry to read about your problems with Word, and yes, the programs sucks.

I really hope Pages 06 is a Word killer. Apple certainly can do it. It's just a matter of will.

But having one less MS product is a good thing...fingers crossed that Apple delivers.
 
BWhaler said:
Sorry to read about your problems with Word, and yes, the programs sucks.

I really hope Pages 06 is a Word killer. Apple certainly can do it. It's just a matter of will.

But having one less MS product is a good thing...fingers crossed that Apple delivers.
Click to expand...

Search for the "Why do we hate M$ Office so much?" thread (I think that was the correct title). You'll find that your opinion of M$ Office sucking is not the norm for most Mac users. Although I doubt anyone WANTS M$ software on their Mac system it is hardly an arguement that M$ is an excellent software company producing some great products, M$ Office included. Pages is not meant to compete with M$ Word for general purpose word processing, it is a publishing tool and will likely not change from that purpose....although it may be expanded slightly and enhanced indefintely.
 
efoto said:
Search for the "Why do we hate M$ Office so much?" thread (I think that was the correct title). You'll find that your opinion of M$ Office sucking is not the norm for most Mac users. Although I doubt anyone WANTS M$ software on their Mac system it is hardly an arguement that M$ is an excellent software company producing some great products, M$ Office included. Pages is not meant to compete with M$ Word for general purpose word processing, it is a publishing tool and will likely not change from that purpose....although it may be expanded slightly and enhanced indefintely.
Click to expand...


Agreed. People are always on the "M$ sucks bandwagon", when really they should be on the "Windows sucks" bandwagon.

M$ office is a great suite, and in all my years of using Mac software (since 1986), I can honestly say that I have had just as much difficulty with Apple software as with M$ software on a Mac, which is to say little from each. The Mac OS, pre X, had serious issues. If you head on over to Apple's support forums and take a read through the archives, you will see that iLife05 had a lot of issues when it first came out. Safari crashes every now and then. You can't currently listen to protected music on an iShuffle with Tiger.

Every software developer has these issues.... and Apple is no different.

The bottom line is that there is no competitor to M$ office.... iWorks doesn't even come close to having the same functionality.

To have to delete preferences, and possibly reinstall the app, is not an uncommon occurence with software packages... be them from M$ or other developers.
 
Found the answer

Tried everything even a reinstall. And for all you M$ lovers it was not microsoft it actually was the fact that I had smart folders in my documents folder and they apparently were causing the open dialog box to open very very slowly. I trashed them and lo and behold now when I press open that dialog box is now snappy again. I knew those smart folders were over-rated anyway and painfully slow. Spotlight is also pretty slow compared to other things likes quicksilver. Hope this helps someone else out with similar problems.
 
bellis1 said:
...it actually was the fact that I had smart folders in my documents folder and they apparently were causing the open dialog box to open very very slowly.
Click to expand...

Wow! That's something I never would have thought of. I have not used Smart Folders yet... I wonder if this is a general problem with the OS X open file requesters? I guess you can always use the search bar that's in the requester, though.... :eek:
 
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