OSX Lion & Office for Mac 2011 go slow

07/01/2012
Hello everyone,
Since installing Office for Mac 2011 (Home & Business edition with Outlook) 6 weeks ago everything on my MAC Book Pro/OS X Lion has slowed to a totally unacceptable speed. The annoying little coloured circular icon rotates for minutes at a time when trying to open Word, Outlook etc. When i'm in Outlook if I select the Calendar option it takes over a minute to open. Typing emails is just as irritating as each letter jerks and pauses as I depress each key. All programs appear to be affected and it is getting worse by the day.
My address book also keeps adding empty entries for no reason. The last time over a 1,000 blank entries appeared which I immediately deleted.
Why is this happening? Should I uninstall Office for MAC 2008? Are they clashing or is there another reason? It has only started since I installed Office for MAC 2011 & OSX Lion. Prior to that I was operating OSX Snow Leopard and Office for MAC 2008.
Many thanks to anyone who can help.
Y

Upgrading on laptops has reportedly slowed things down. Have a read of this thread and consider doing a clean install. You can download Lion again from the App Store and make a USB thumb drive.


http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/262770-looking-help-re-install-lion.html

You didn't mention how much RAM you have and how much free hard drive space you have. Both could be playing a big role here ...

Thank you for your response. I have 2+2gbRAM and 250gb capacity with 136gb available.
E-mails are also now taking an age to transmit and the system appears to be getting slower. Not sure if this is OSX LION or MS Office 2011 issue now.
Thanks again.
y

Okay, thanks. We can rule out the RAM and HD space as possible factors.

If it's ONLY happening in Office programs then of course I'd suspect MS Office. If it's happening else where it could be a sign of a failing hard drive (keep those backups up to date), or possibly some other factor.

Having two copies of Office installed can't be a very good idea in any event. I would use MS Office's own uninstaller program to remove the older version of Office.

Also, just a hunch, but please tell us you don't have any "anti-virus" or MacKeeper-type programs installed ...

By all means uninstall Office 2008 even though Microsoft claims it's not necessary when running Office 2011. Just make sure you follow Microsoft's instructions for completely removing Office 2008 as the uninstaller does not do so.

The link for the removal instructions is here.