Office 2008 Slow Startup

January 31st, 2008

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With the release of Microsoft’s new Office 2008 Suite for Mac, I had hoped that my days of using Office 2007 in Windows through Parallels were over.

Although I can honestly say that the new Office 2008 is much nicer, I find that the speed of startup of Word and Excel are a little unacceptable. After digging around, I found a fix over at the MacRumors Forums to speed up the startup time of at least Word:

  1. Launch word
  2. Go to Word —>Preferences
  3. Click on “General”
  4. Uncheck “WYSIWYG font and style menus”
  5. Uncheck “Show Project Gallery At Startup”
  6. Quit Word
  7. Reopen Word
This seems to speed up startup time for Word pretty drastically. For Excel, I haven’t quite found a good solution, but disabling the Project Gallery at startup would definitely help.

There have been some benchmarks done comparing the old and new versions of Office, and frankly the results aren’t all that impressive. Still, its better to have the new version than the old. If I find any new information on this, I’ll be sure an update this post.

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my website is a collection of my work and writing since 2004, so please don't be surprised if things seem a little outdated, particularly in the technology section. That said, the concepts behind most posts should be interesting given all that's happened since they were written so enjoy!