The "Adam" below is Adam Engst. Someone should tell him that most people don't get paid by the word to write so "Live Word Count" isn't too important :-) Anyhow, these are pretty good tips since Word for OS X tends to gobble up quite a few CPU cycles even when it's in the background.
From: Errol Lewthwaite Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 1:39 PM To: TidBITS Talk Subject: Re: Closing applications quickly in Mac OS XSomething I have just discovered to speed up MS Word on OS X significantly.
When looking at top (in Terminal) when Word has a document open Word is often using 30-50% of CPU.
In Word Preferences turn off "Preferences/View/Window/Live Word Count". CPU usage drops down to about 0-10%.
[Along the same lines, turning off inline spell checking would probably help, but in both these cases, the features are useful for many of us all the time. -Adam]