Is there anything more frustrating than typing lag or slow-loading documents when you’re on a deadline? While Microsoft Office is one of the most widely used application suites for all kinds of projects in the modern office, it doesn't always show excellent performance.
When Microsoft Office slows down, showing you spinning wheels and requiring long wait times, it breaks your flow and concentration, ultimately affecting your productivity.
Open Excel for Mac 2011 and try to save a file. If you can save a file, review the contents of 'New Folder' to decide which files that you want to keep. If the problem continues to occur, go to the next method. To empty the AutoRecovery folder, follow these steps if you. With the 2016 version of Word for Mac, Microsoft offers a solid and long-awaited update to an essential OS X application. Brawny word processor: With its solid collection of templates.
Microsoft Word For Mac Spinning Wheel Save Document Free
Thankfully, there are a few proven ways to speed up Microsoft Office on your Mac, and most of them are as simple as tidying up. If Marie Kondo has taught us anything, it’s that clutter can cause unnecessary stress in life. And this applies to hard drives as well!
Why is Microsoft Office slow?
While there are a few different symptoms indicating that Microsoft Office isn’t doing its best, such as a painfully slow opening of a program or Microsoft Word slow typing, the question stands: why is Microsoft Word so slow?
There are a variety of reasons Microsoft Office may run slowly, freeze, or cause the much dreaded typing lag. Often, the issue stems from a build-up of corrupted or temporary files that are meant to be automatically deleted but, for whatever reason, have failed to do so. The application suite could also be out of date or attempt to load corrupted files. Very likely it’s just a large number of small problems that have snowballed and are now causing noticeable issues. Here’s how you can fix it.
Refresh go-to templates
The template file normal.dot is created by Microsoft Word and stored automatically on your computer. It saves all the default settings of the application. So each time you change your settings, the preference is added to normal.dot. This way, the next time Microsoft Word opens a new document, your preferred settings load automatically. If your normal.dot file becomes corrupted or too complex to load, it can make Microsoft Word slow.
Deleting the existing normal.dot file will force Microsoft Word to create a new one. Starting fresh will be easy for most users, as the majority of us don’t stray too far from the default settings. For those that change their default settings in complex ways, make sure you back up your normal.dot files to a flash drive to avoid losing important settings permanently.
To find and delete normal.dot manually:
Finally, reload the application and see if the process has managed to speed up Microsoft Word.
Delete temporary files
All Microsoft Office programs will create temporary files to prevent you from losing your work. However, if the automatic removal of these files fails, they can build up and make Microsoft Office slow.
You can easily seek out and remove these files:
Once you are done, reload the application to see if that did speed up Microsoft Word.
Keep Microsoft Office updated
Having an outdated version of Microsoft Office will eventually cause it to run slowly. Luckily, updating the suite is very easy:
Additionally, you can turn on Microsoft auto-updates using the same dialogue box, so that whenever Microsoft Office detects a new version it will offer you an opportunity to install it.
Another way to update Microsoft Office is to directly download the latest one from the Microsoft website. But before you do, check that it’s fully compatible with your version of macOS.
Reset the application to default settings
Over time, all Mac apps accumulate lots of unneeded preferences that constantly rewrite each other. A good way to rule out that there’s anything wrong with the app is to do a factory reset — bring the app back to the state when it was brand new.
You can do a factory reset in two ways:
Alternatively, you can do the same thing quicker and more thoroughly with the CleanMyMac X uninstaller utility:
Delete and reinstall Microsoft Office
The old IT adage “have you tried turning it off and back on?” applies here, but in this case, it’s about deleting the application and reinstalling it. To completely delete Microsoft Office, you will need to remove files from two different places on your computer: delete the app first and then find your Library folder in Finder to see the associated files that need to be removed.
Once removed, head back to the Microsoft website, sign in to your account, and install the latest version.
Optimize documents for storage
Keeping Microsoft Office functioning properly means saving documents in their most optimized state. Resizing large images or graphics and not overloading your files with macros will help you maintain speedy performance in the long run.
Speed up Microsoft Office automatically in minutes
While all the above maintenance will help you speed up Microsoft Office, it can be time-consuming and finicky. Troubleshooting your app version, deleting and refreshing templates, and searching for temporary files is all manual work and could eat up a few hours.
To make things easy, you can use optimization software like CleanMyMac X, which will automatically detect and remove temporary as well as unused files to get your Microsoft Office running smoothly. Here’s how to do it:
While following the above method of optimizing your Mac with CleanMyMac X is enough to remove any unnecessary clutter, the app’s sidebar menu offers even more options for increasing the speed of your Mac as well as a handy uninstaller for quick and thorough uninstallations of apps you don’t need anymore.
Ultimately, there are a number of ways to get Microsoft Office to run smoothly again. And although it’s entirely possible to do most of the cleanup manually, using an app like CleanMyMac X is a much faster and easier way to get rid of junk and ensure that your Mac is performing at top speed.
macOS Catalina has been a problem for some users who have experienced Mail issues after the upgrade. Some users who use Microsoft Outlook as their Mail client have seen that their outlook app simply freezes or is very slow to respond on macOS Catalina.
This issue is more likely related to a particular property of Outlook as opposed to macOS Catalina. We have seen this issue happen in prior macOS instances such as High Sierra.
Related:
When Outlook is trying to preview folders with encrypted emails, this issue pops up and causes your Outlook to freeze and not respond.
Most of the times, Microsoft Office folks release updates that can handle this problem and other Outlook issues.
Before you attempt at troubleshooting this issue, you may first want to update the latest Outlook install on your Mac running Catalina.
On the Top menu of Outlook, Click on Help > Check for Updates. Update to the latest software from here.
Fix Outlook Freezing issue on macOS Catalina
Once you have applied the latest Outlook updates to your Mac, you can fix any Outlook freezing issues on macOS Catalina with the help of these steps below:
Didn't Save Microsoft Word Document
Microsoft Outlook also offers an Outlook Reset Preferences tool that you can utilities to reset your outlook.
Other Microsoft Office related issues on macOS Catalina
If you are noticing other performance issues with Microsoft products such as Word, please make sure that you are using the 64 bit version of Word. Check if the version of Word is 16.29 and above.Version 16.30 was made available by Microsoft on Oct 10 (last week) to address some Catalina related issues. This should help with any Outlook crashing issues on your MacBook.
Check and make sure that you have updated to the latest by launching Autoupdate.
That will confirm that you are on the 64 bit version of Office. According to Microsoft, Mac OS Catalina is compatible with Microsoft Office version 16.16.14.
After updating to the 64 bit version, some users realize that they can open and read Microsoft word documents but are unable to edit it. This annoyance along with other Office related problems can be usually fixed by running a Disk Repair on your MacBook.
Please feel to reach out to Microsoft support if you are encountering other serious issues such as missing files and folders after the update and they should be able to help you with the issues.
Obsessed with tech since the early arrival of A/UX on Apple, Sudz (SK) is responsible for the editorial direction of AppleToolBox. He is based out of Los Angeles, CA.
Sudz specializes in covering all things macOS, having reviewed dozens of OS X and macOS developments over the years.
Free Microsoft Word For Mac
In a former life, Sudz worked helping Fortune 100 companies with their technology and business transformation aspirations.
Related Posts:Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |