Speed up Microsoft Word launch

Tue, 22 May 2007

I came across this article on Mac OSX hints website, suggesting how to speed up MS Word launch:

Turning off WYSIWYG font and style menus has greatly reduced my Word startup times. To do so, go to Word ยป Preferences and in the General section, deselect WYSIWYG font and style menus, it’s third from the bottom. Voila! Faster Word.

I thought I’ll check it for myself, so I did some testing. First I created a simple test.doc file, just one line of unformatted text, file size 20kB and saved on my Desktop.

word.jpg

I made sure the WYSIWYG option is enabled, then rebooted the computer. After a clean boot I double-clicked on test.doc and timed the start up - 30.1 seconds. Now I closed the file and quit Word (Cmnd-Q), then double-clicked the file again and the Word opened in 4.4 sec.

Time to disable WYSIWYG and see what’s the difference. After yet another reboot I double-clicked the test file and Word opened in 18.0 seconds flat. Quit Word and reopen the file again - same 4.4 seconds.

Conclusion - disabling WYSIWYG font and style menus does speed up the Word launch, but once you have it opened, or rather loaded into memory, it makes no difference.

The machine used in test is an Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro with 1 GB RAM, MS Word 2004 running in Rosetta. Times measured with a stop watch on my mobile phone, so you can give or take a couple of tenths to the results, but you get the picture.

Stumble it!

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One Response to “Speed up Microsoft Word launch”

  1. Paul said: Wed, 23 May 2007 at 01:47

    You should probably try that again after logging in and out because when you shut down an app, OS X keeps it in memory until its needed for something else. This is to speed up launch times in case you want to use that app again. That’s what the inactive memory is when you look at Activity monitor.

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