October 13, 2009

Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint will crash if your saving path is too long

One of my clients kept having problems with Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac crashing when he was using copy/paste functions. Nothing we did seemed to fix it and we could not find any info. about the problem on the net.

After upgrading to Office 2008 we were hoping for better performance but it immediately began crashing when saving. Not every time but often. We have worked on this issue for quite awhile and finally discovered that if we moved the file that crashed to the Desktop it did not crash.

That led us to looking at the enclosing folder more carefully. We finally discovered that the path to the document was quite long, over 300 characters. If we shortened the path below 256 it would save. If not it crashed.

Mystery solved but my client (because his folder structure is huge and well thought out) has to move working documents to the Desktop then manually move them back into his archives.

I tested Apple's Pages (an older version) and Sun's OpenOffice. Neither of these programs had the issue.

One other point on Office 2008 for Home and Students. Entourage no longer supports Exchange servers. But you can run the old Entourage if you don't delete it during the 2008 install process.

Snow Leopard 10.6 has a Problem!

That could be serious. If you have Guest access allowed on your Mac and you update to Snow Leopard you could ***lose access to your own data***! It happens when some uses the Guest login.

If you do have Guest access enabled:
-Backup up everything now
-Turn off Guest access ( It is in the System Preferences in the Accounts area )
-Use a limited user account for guests


See this page for more info: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10373212-263.html?tag=mncol;title

Call me if you have questions.