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Hiding in plain sight: Faster Word

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The second in my irregular collection of handy Mac and application features you may (or may not) already know about or which have been slightly hidden: this one is one simple step that makes Microsoft Word launch faster.

Do you lose the will to live while you wait for Word to launch? Do you want to make it launch faster? Then you need this tip. I came across it on the excellent MacOSXHints website. It's so effective I needed to share it here.

When Word launches, part of the start-up process sees the application optimise its font menu. This seems to slow the launch process down, but you can stop it happening.

All you need to do is turn of the WYSIWYG font and style menu feature. To do this, you need to access Word's Preferences and look through the General pane. Near the bottom of the pane you'll find a check box which lets you disable this WYSIWTYG feature - just uncheck it.

Once you've done this you'll see Word (and also Excel and PowerPoint) launch appreciably faster than before.

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imajoebob said on Friday, 25 May 2007

Holy Hannah! That's brilliant! It took my start-up on my old PB Ti from about 20 seconds down to about 5.

One question: How does this change the way Word (et al) have worked?

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