Office 2004 is buggy - no wonder there - and if you install a significant amount of fonts on your system, the font caching crap reruns every time you restart an Office application, even if you haven't changed your fonts. Some rough testing I did seems to put the number of font files after the bug occurs at around 1000.
And every style counts separately in that number, eg. Bold, Italic, etc. Which fonts you install doesn't matter, only the number of them. For me to stop the font caching nightmare to stop for good was to actually trash the FontCacheTool application.
Hi I'm using Word for Mac 2004 on a new macbook w/ Leopard. Scrolling down a document with either the mouse wheel or the sidebar has been very slow (it scroll is very slow on Word:Mac 2004 - Microsoft Office Word. Nov 11, 2018 - Step by step instructions how to how to fix Microsoft Word slow on your PC and Mac. Find solutions to fix slow response when opening.
Even if I unchecked the WYSIWYG font menus option it kept on remaking its stupid cache. All I have to say is thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am running a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 Al with Word v.X, and launches are atrociously slow for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Me and my boss (small company) do a lot of graphic design, and so have somewhere over 1900 fonts (Not including the likes of Bold, Italics, Light and Condensed, etc.) on each of our systems. He still uses Office for most things, but I have gone to using Keynote and Pages for everything and simply using their MS Office export formats. I can finally go back to the easy way of getting the file formats right for Office!
Thanks again! Well when you work at an ad agency and no one needs the font previews in Office apps, and they only want to look at a Word document and not click OK 20 or 30 times because Word think that this or that font is corrupt (despite trashing /Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11)) then you can also do this: Move/delete this file: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Support Files/FontCacheTool Same effect as the tip, but more final in case you trash prefs and it turns back on. robg adds: Interestingly, this option is Office-wide switch - turn off WYSIWYG menus in Word, and you'll also disable them in Excel and PowerPoint.
You can also disable them in Excel or PowerPoint (the effect is still Office-wide). Of course, the setting is found in an entirely different location in those two apps: Go to Tools » Customize » Customize Toolbars/Menus, not Preferences. At the bottom right of this window, uncheck WYSIWYG font menus.I recall from when I had to live more in Office that this kind of change-in-one-reset-in-all behavior was fairly common.
It was also common, as Rob points out in this case, for the switches to be located in different places. Since in that environment I mostly thought of the universal settings as a good thing, I didn't keep notes on the particulars, but it's definitely something for Office users to be aware of.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. Thomas Jefferson to Col. Yancey, 1816. Joelbruner recommends trashing (or at least moving) Office 2004's FontCacheTool to stop problems with optimizing the font menu on startup. I have a lot of fonts and get this frequently, combined with the familiar problem of cascading bogus corrupt font messages. The fonts aren't corrupt, but something about having lots of fonts corrupts one or more cache file frequently.
For me, the solution (workaround) has been to u8se Font Finagles, a $7 shareware product thqat nukes font cache files. Readers should be careful about deleting the FontCacheTool. I have tried this. One consequence is that Word no longer substitutes correct weights of fonts when you use Word's Bold, Italic, etc. For example, if you are in Times New Roman and hit the Bold button (or do Command-B), Word normally substitute the true Bold weight of the font. However, with this tool removed, it will do its own fairly crude approximation of boldrace, using letters thickened in Word. You can overcome this by always faithfully choosing the true Bold weight of the font from the font menu, or by doing a global find/replace before printing.
Each of these is a nuisance. For me the irritqation of having to run Font Finagler ($7) most of the time before a restart is less irritating than dealing with crud-looking Bold, Italic, etc. First, some readers say it doesn't happen to them. I've found that it will always 'optimize' if there has been an unexpected quit of any type (system crash, word crash, et al). I've experienced this on multiple Macs, even those that automatically restart after a power failure, so it is very common, contrary to some user's experiences. Second, I could not get this hint to work for me.
Word still insists on optimizing even with the checkbox off (verified in Word and Excel both). It again may be related to a crash or some other issue. I've repaired fonts, repaired permissions, and just about everything else, but it still happens. One of the major annoyances of Word because of the protacted launch time.
What gets me is even after Word has 'optimized' the fonts, launching Excel will result in the same activity. You'd think the suite would be smart enough to rely on the other running application to let it know the fonts are OK.
Word 2007 — and now Word 2010 — on my Vista laptop has often been very slow to load a document and to respond to a document command (like Save). I’ve been blaming Vista But when I started to edit a 300+ page Word 2010 document on my Vista laptop, the unresponsiveness was going to be a huge productivity drain.
So off to Google to see if there was an answer to this problem. And there is! And it’s not related to Vista at all, but to how a Word document interacts with the default printer. If the default printer is a networked printer, then there can be response issues. In my case, the default printer is not only a networked printer, but when I opened this 300+ page document, the printer was turned off (it was a Sunday and I don’t use the printer all the time, especially on weekends).
After following the, I changed my default printer on the Vista laptop to Adobe PDF (Microsoft EPS works well too, I believe). And guess what? The document responded beautifully! No more achingly long Not responding messages in the Word 2010 title bar; no more watching the ‘spinning wheel of death’ (as I like to call it) while waiting and waiting for the Word document to respond because it was trying to talk to my network printer. But I have to question WHY Microsoft still ties things like Word documents so closely to the default printer. Most of us have many ‘printers’ listed these days — many of which aren’t even printers, but instead are printer drivers. If a network printer is set as the default and it can’t find it, then why don’t we get a message to tell us to change to another printer driver so we can work in a fully responsive document?
Link last checked April 2011. Not just network printers. I have a Canon MX880 printer (fax, copy, scan, etc) and noticed this happening every so often.
Changed the default printer to PDF and the (I like the description) spinning wheel of death went away and typing became immediately responsive, I changed back to the printer and the wheel popped up again, went back to PDF and it was all good again. But this doesn’t seem to affect Excel and it doesn’t happen all the time. Thanks for the hint. Nick W June 8, 2013 at 2:26 am.
Hi Ernest Have you got other printers/printer drivers you can try? (they’ll be listed under Devices and Printers — perhaps try the Fax one, or OneNote, if you have Microsoft Office installed) Of course, if another one also doesn’t work, your slowness may not be related to the printer at all — very large and complex documents can respond slowly, especially if you’re opening them over a network and not from your local machine. And having auto saves on for the default ‘every 10 mins’ can cause issues too, so try increasing the auto save time to 30 mins.
–Rhonda July 21, 2016 at 6:25 am. This solved a problem where machines on a slow link was unable to use the Office programs because of totally taxed down by their default printer. Documents with just a few pages they were able to use, but it was painfully slow. In my case it was KONICA MINOLTA Universal PCL drivers and printers. Affected more than Office 2010, also 2013 and 2016 was suffering. Great find indeed. The core of the problem here maybe that every time the printer is activated from the client it tries some kind of auto config, asking the printer of it capabilities, this takes a couple of seconds.
If the Office programs is triggering this repeatedly and then waits for answer, that could be the answer why everything comes to a grinding halt. I’ve just disabled the Auto config option on the printers, centrally on the server (which I presume the client picks up and honors), and it solved the problem. Now client can have these printers as default and still use the Office programs. Success and solved!
Brgs, Iorx February 16, 2018 at 7:42 am.