I had a period of about three months where it took for-evah to open up Word on my machine. Like, very slowly. Like, on the order of a minute or so. Like, to the point where I was using WordPad and text editors rather than Word.
I did a number of stabs at researching the problem. Most things pointed to Word looking for files online, but that didn’t apply to me. Others simply says, “uninstall it and reinstall it and see if it works” (hate those kind of answers).
Finally had the problem solve itself, and in a way that called to mind a solution I’d read and either disregarded or forgotten to follow up on. It had suggested deleting the NORMAL.DOT style master file. One day I got an odd message saying that my saving a document was going to overwrite NORMAL .DOT and is that what I wanted? I answered “Yes” and, hey-presto, Word now loads up in 5-10 seconds. Woot!
So, as an ongoing reminder to myself (and suggestion to anyone else in the same boat) … try deleting NORMAL.DOT. “I hear that works sometimes (whistles innocently).”
This is an excellent tip, and is a troubleshooting step still looked over by many techs to solve a lot of the MS Word problems.
For me I have given up on MS Office and switched to OpenOffice entirely.
I really don’t mind Word. Since I get my copy “free” at the office for my notebook, it’s not like I worry about the cost.
Buh…..unless you’re working documents over a network. In which case, you have just damned yourself to HELL if the network ever has a microsecond glitch. If your formatting starts changing — even though you just saved the document — you need to get an updated template.