Graham,
That's OK ... it is, fortunately, a fairly minor delay. Irritating but not
pivotal - I can live with it. Aside from that I've always been pleased with
MS Office apps.
-cb
--
A landing is a controlled midair collision between an aircraft and a
celestial body - Airp Airp.
"Graham Mayor" wrote:
I don't know how relevant this is to your question, but Word works closely
in conjunction with the active printer driver to format the document. To
that extent they are indivisible. It shouldn't matter whether the printer is
connected or not. The driver is always required.
FWIW I doubt that Microsoft is monitoring this peer group forum. If you want
to talk to Microsoft support I am sure they would be happy to take your
money.
--
Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org
CodeBubba wrote:
All,
I've been observing an intermittent problem with Mostly Word - but
also Excel. I've seen this both in the 2002 and 2003 versions of the
programs.
The problem is that sometimes when trying to open a .DOC file from
the file explorer (Windows XP Pro) it takes 5 to 10 seconds before
the Word splash screen appears and the file loads. I have observed
this on a couple of different machines. Sometimes it seemed to
happen immediately after machine start-up, sometimes it didn't happen
until after the machine was up for awhile.
I read a lot of messages on this and other forums all offering
basically the same advice, none of which seemed to work. I tinkered
with the file association and noticed that Word seems to require a
DDE conversation in order to pass the specified filename to the
program. I tried removing the DDE conversation which caused Word to
start instantly - unfortunately it couldn't find the file. Starting
Word from a shortcut pointed directly at a file was much faster,
though and starting Word directly is instantaneous always. What the
heck is going on?
Then this morning I got up to do something on my computer and
discovered that Word was opening files instantaneously in explorer.
It finally occurred to me that I had not yet turned on my printer.
Once I turned it on, the delay came back. It is now obvious to me
that Word (and the other office programs) are in some way
interrogating the printer driver and waiting on some feedback from it
before continuing to load. Turning the printer off doesn't help as
the driver is then loaded.
And yes ... I have reloaded new printer drivers and have seen this on
multiple types of printers.
What I would like to know from the Microsoft guys is this: Is there
some way (through a command-line switch or other configuration
option) that I can tell Word not to make this call to the printer
driver? Can this call be made at the point when you're trying to
print something as opposed to program start-up? Does setting your
"default printer" to something other than the one connected to your
machine have an effect on this? (I hope not ... seems silly to
disable the 'default' printer).
This problem does not exist in any of the other applications on my
system (Microsoft or otherwise). Can we please have a patch of some
kind or info about how to correct this? It's not a "biggie" in my
case - I can wait the 5 seconds or so - but it's distracting. You
don't even get a busy caret (hourglass) when this happens - the
double-click event simply gets ingested and you don't know for sure
if you've actually fired off Word or not. It's just dirty.
Thanks in advance.
-CB 