[sworthy]

Just about all of us have to use word, whether we like it or not. Even on my 1GHz powerbook it seems fairly slow. I was flipping through the latest MacWorld magazine and used some tips to speed it up quite significantly.

1) Turn off Word's Live Word Count:
Unless at all times you need to know the word count of your doc you can turn this off (word, prefs, view, deselect live word count). Apparently this feature can use up to 30% of your cpu

You can always go to (tools, word count) if your interested in the word count.

2) Use Word's Normal Page View
(View, Normal). When your cpu doesn't have to determine margins, page breaks, etc it speeds everything up quite a bit. Just check out print preview when you want to see what it will look like with page breaks, etc.

I did just these two and word opens much faster and performs much snappier*tm

[typoon]

Originally posted by sworthy:
Just about all of us have to use word, whether we like it or not. Even on my 1GHz powerbook it seems fairly slow. I was flipping through the latest MacWorld magazine and used some tips to speed it up quite significantly.

1) Turn off Word's Live Word Count:
Unless at all times you need to know the word count of your doc you can turn this off (word, prefs, view, deselect live word count). Apparently this feature can use up to 30% of your cpu

You can always go to (tools, word count) if your interested in the word count.

2) Use Word's Normal Page View
(View, Normal). When your cpu doesn't have to determine margins, page breaks, etc it speeds everything up quite a bit. Just check out print preview when you want to see what it will look like with page breaks, etc.

I did just these two and word opens much faster and performs much snappier*tm

Step 3 Get Panther. Word lodas MUCH faster under Panther than Jaguar.

[TC]

Also if you have a lot of contacts in Entourage make sure to tick "Exclude Contacts" in the Autotext panel of the AutoCorrect options.

If you really want to speed up typing then just turn off AutoText completely and don't check spelling as you type.

[TheIceMan]

Does anyone know how to unselect the Word splash screen that starts up when you launch Word? I really hate how much time it wastes.

[milhouse]

Not sure how to disable the splash.

As an alternative you may consider mellel if you want something very fast and lean. It supposedly reads word .doc files but support is relatively poor (mangled my resume in table format) and saves to rtf, which word can open.

cheers

[cpac]

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Does anyone know how to unselect the Word splash screen that starts up when you launch Word? I really hate how much time it wastes.

If you mean the project gallery, you can change it in preferences.

If you mean the actual spash, no way around that, though it's not particularly slow in and of itself...

[Peter]

Originally posted by typoon:
Step 3 Get Panther. Word lodas MUCH faster under Panther than Jaguar.

Word loads in under 2 bounces for me