Moving an application to an external

Alright, I feel a little noobish asking this question, but am I able to move an application to my external hard drive. I am trying to reinstall leopard, but I don't have the disk for Microsoft word and I don't want to go through the hassle of finding the disk and reinstalling it.

If you're referring to MS Office Word.... Moving it to an external and then back without doing a new install is probably not going to work as there are files scattered throughout the OS. Also, the product ID code is encrypted into one of those supporting files.

Why don't you make a clone backup of your hard drive or at least use Time Machine? You can do a restore with Time Machine while you're reinstalling Leopard.

Regards.

You sure couldn't do that with the Windows version. But maybe you can with the Mac version. Try it and let us know.

I've never tried it with "MS Office Word" as the proper name appears to be, but I've had success with other applications. I moved an old version of Flash, Photoshop Elements, and a few others from my mom's old iBook onto my old MB with a USB flash drive.

I have moved Office 2004 over to an external successfully by just dragging it over to the other drive. Can't say how well this works with 2008 (which I have, but am not particularly inclined to test this and I don't have an external drive hooked up at the moment) but you can definitely drag the app over to some folder on the external and it should work fine.

If you don't have the disk how you going to re-install it and then activate it? Larger applications, MS Office included, do not drag and drop well and a clean ionstall is the best option.

You'll have to also copy library files from both User library and System Library folders with Office 2008.

You may try googling it, but if not, just let me know. I've done this before.