Quick look has stopped working with MS Word docs

Would love to know why the finder's quick look function has ceased working for all my mircrosoft word docs (also in Path Finder). Any ideas?

OS 10.6.3
Word 2008 12.2.4

Thanks!

Ours is not to answer why
But to provide the fix
And let you fly...

Find this file following the path indicated
HD/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.QuickLookDaemon.plist
Move the file to your Desktop
Restart. (I think that's necessary in this case to generate a new plist file.)
Verify that a new plist file (same name) is in that folder.
Try QuickLook again

If that gets you off the ground, the plist file was the problem (no idea why) and you can Trash the old one.

If not, report the result and we'll proceed from there.

toMACsh said:

Ours is not to answer why
But to provide the fix

Click to expand...

Ah yes...

OK, I tried generating a new plist file as you instructed. But this did not fix the problem. What other fixes can you suggest?

Same drill:
HD/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist

Note that it's one more folder

OK, tried that, still no dice.

At first I was a bit worried, becuase I didn't have the ....word.prefs.plist file you mention. But then I found here that this plist belongs to Office 2004. For 2008, the file's location is YouUserName/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist. I also tried the other plist the above url suggests: YouUserName/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist.

I moved these two files to the desktop after quiting all office apps, then rebooted, opened word (creating new plist files, which I confirmed), but quick look (and cover flow as well) still won't work.

Arggggg... this is a feature I've really come to rely on from OS X!

Have you tried to do a clean via Disk Utility ?? Repairing permissions ??
If not give it a go as it wont hurt and once done log out then back in again?? Post back

Cheers

TattooedMac said:

Have you tried to do a clean via Disk Utility ?? Repairing permissions ??

Click to expand...

Good idea, should have done this first. Now I have, twice, rebooting afterwards, and still no quicklook.

Funny thing about running disk permissions, every time I've ever run it, the same two issues come up. The first never seems to get permenantly fixed. The second is a warning I don't know what to do with. I'll paste them in below.

One point of clarification about my problem, when I say quicklook isn't working for MS office docs, I mean that a semi-transparent box with the file info and an office icon appears when I hit the space bar, instead of the document preview that used to come up.

Thanks!

Permissions differ on "usr/share/derby", should be drwxr-xr-x , they are lrwxr-xr-x
Repaired "usr/share/derby"
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired

Ok, this is apparently not something that plist files are affecting. The only other one to try would be finder, but I doubt there would be a different result. Sorry I forgot to mention my version of Office.

Have you tried logging in under a different User Account? You might try that and see if QuickLook behaves.

OK, tried logging in under a different account. Still not behaving.

Thanks a lot for continuing to try and help me fix this! I really appreciate it. I've posted the question to the Apple disscusion forums (for Snow leopard, finder and dock issues), as well as the MS Office for Mac forum (Mactopia). I'll post a solution here if I get an answer from one of them.

Just a stab in the dark here... did you by chance run "Monolingual" or any other utility that supposedly removes languages not used or PPC code if running an Intel machine?

If you did, note that this can mess over MS Office big time. (See Mactopia Word Forum for full write up.) The fix is to remove Office and re-install with all updates over again.

Regards.

chscag said:

Just a stab in the dark here... did you by chance run "Monolingual" or any other utility that supposedly removes languages not used or PPC code if running an Intel machine?

Click to expand...

Nope, but thanks.

chscag said:

Just a stab in the dark here... remove Office and re-install with all updates over again.

Click to expand...

However, that might be worth a try anyway. Be sure to run the uninstaller first, found here (OS10.5.8 Office 2004):

~/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Additional Tools/Remove Office/Remove Office

Where ~ stands for your Home Folder, then find the folder and uninstaller with the same name.

Ok, I tried reinstalling Office (which is 2008, not 2004 btw) to see if that would fix the problem. I tried once using the Remove Office tool, which never worked in the past, but did this time, although it took FOREVER to run. This didn't have any effect on the Quick Look problem. Then an apple store employee here suggested that the Remove Office tool actually leaves quite a few files on your system (true) which in their expereince often are the source of problems, so always delete Office and it's user files in various places manually. I did this, and achived a fairly clean reinstall (had to re-enter my product key, id info, etc.), but this still had no effect on Quick Look.

So I'm pretty sure at this point that it must be an OS X problem. Fixing this is not worth doing an OS X reinstall and system recovery from time machine right now... so other suggestions would be welcome, otherwise, I guess I give up for now.

riverteeth said:

So I'm pretty sure at this point that it must be an OS X problem.

Click to expand...

If QuickLook only fails to perform properly on Word files, then I disagree with that conclusion. To me, that would indicate that Word is the culprit. Is Word 2008 12.2.4 the latest version? (Run Microsoft AutoUpdate to see.) Perhaps there is, or will be, an update to make it play nice with OS 10.6.3

Yea, that would make sense to me as well, but one of the first things I tried was to make sure I had the latest Office updates (I have it set to check once a week, but I ran it manually several times during this process). If 12.2.4 just didn't play nice with OS 10.6.3, I would expect to see others with this same issue, but I haven't found a single person.

I went into a different Apple store again today here in Taipei, and in helping me check my system, the tech there came to the conclusion that my system is running way to slow and glitchy for my configuration. So he convinced me that a clean re-install would be worth it. Booting up takes almost five minutes, and opening pretty much any program can take between 30 sec. and 90 sec. I think there's probably some other program that might be affecting it, but I have so much junk installed right now, it would be hard for me to troubleshoot one by one. So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow morning!

Uninstall the junk while you're at it. !

Final report:

So I finally erased my boot drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard completely fresh, bringing over files and library cataloges manually from backup, instead of using Time Machine as I had in the past. The result is as I had hoped: problem with quick look solved, plus 200% faster performance all around. Instead of unistalling the junk, I just made the easy decision not to install anything I hadn't used in 6 months, mostly stuff I had installed to try out, or for a specific purpose, and then never touch again.

My one question now is, perhaps better for a seperate post, could I have achieved the same result and saved time buy using the migration assistant to move my files and some preferences from my time machine backup. I avoided doing this this time because I wanted to make sure any extraneous or even corrupt files didn't get over to my new system. Since this is my first Mac in ten years, I still haven't had a chance to use Migration assistant....

Thanks again for all the suggestions!