Killing Word 2004's "Optimizing Font Menu Performance"

We still have some users on Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac. From time to time — generally after a restart or a fresh login — there's a huge delay when launching Word.

The message that Word displays, in the splash graphic, is "Optimizing font menu performance..."

Depending on the speed of your machine's processor, and the number of fonts installed, this can take literally four or five minutes on an older machine.

This is done because Word offers rich WYSIWYG font menus in the Formatting Palette, so you can see what fonts look like, as well as the font name. That's the good news. The bad news is that Word 2004 reads and processes every installed font in order to pre-build that WYSIWIG menu upon startup. That can take a long time, and because that process is both CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive, many older Macs are rendered unusable while this happens.

Here's how to eliminate that annoying delay:

• Make sure you have a document open
• Select Word -> Preferences...
• In the preferences pane, select General
• Uncheck the box marked "WYSIWYG font and style menus"
• Press OK

Now, Word 2004 will start almost instantly each time.