A few days ago I mentioned that I was trying to troubleshoot the spinning beach ball encountered whenever son attempted to save a Word doc on his BRAND NEW white MacBook. Specifically, we’re talking about MS Office for Mac 2004 and Tiger duking it out.

Tech support for Microsoft suggested a reinstall of the MS Office software. An online search, however, turned up a number of other fixes. I prioritized the 6 suggestions I found in order of least to most invasive and took the plunge.

What did NOT work was to trash the preferences for Word (com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist) or to trash the Fonts DO (found inside the folder called Office that’s inside the MS Office Folder inside the applications folder) file.

What DID work, was to drag the entire preferences folder for Office onto the desktop and then reboot.

As a followup, I found an updater for MS Office for Mac 2004 that I grabbed. All still working great through six tests.

Does anyone even care?? First, being on a Mac is of little interest to most of the world. Secondly, if it’s not a technical problem you, too, are having, why file this info away?

I found it interesting that I could not find a single reference to this issue on Mac online support, nor on Microsoft online support, nor had my vendor heard of this issue. Did I discover an actual bug? Likely not, or I wouldn’t have quickly found other people online discussing the glitch and things to try.

Meanwhile, I feel like a conquering hero! I solved the problem in a mere three hours. If you run into this anomaly, feel free to contact me and I’ll give you more specific fix instructions.