If Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2008 crashes and restart fails

[Library]

Mac OS X only:

1. Quit all Office applications.
   
2. Navigate to your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder and drag the file(s) listed below to your desktop. Be sure to start from your "Home" folder
   (NOTE: "~" indicates your user home directory. (ie. /Macintosh HD/Users/yourusername/)
   
3. Relaunch Word. The file(s) will be recreated when you do so.
   
4. If all is well, trash the old file(s). In the case of the Word Preferences/Settings file, you will have to reset some preferences (and, for versions earlier than Word 2008, the AutoCorrect settings).
   
5. If this doesn't help, quit Word again, trash the new files and drag the original files back to where they belong. If using Word 2008, look for leftover preferences from earlier versions (see below).

Files to Test:
(NOTE: "Testing" a preference file simply refers to removing the preference file from the default location (~/Library/Preferences/) and verifying that Word starts normally (Word will automatically re-create a preference file when it starts if the preference file does not already exist in the default location. To test a preference file, simply move the file from the default location to a different folder, for example a folder you create on your desktop.)

Since the Word Preferences or Settings files are more likely to cause problems in Word than any of the others, we recommend testing those files (the first file on each of the lists above) before any of the others.

In Word 2008:
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist

If testing these files in Word 2008 did not fix the problem, then check to see if you have leftover preferences from Word 2004 or earlier versions. The directions for 2004 are directly below.

In Word 2004:
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache

In Word X:
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Component Preferences
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Carbon Registration Database
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache

[rromero]

I had to force quit Excel 2008 on my late 2008 Macbook running OS 10.5.8. When I restarted and tried to either open any excel file or just the program from the dock it would try to reopen the previous files and get "hung" (spinning pinwheel of death and not responding in activity monitor). I tried removing the files from my computer but this did not help. I found a post online that suggested quitting Excel, then holding the shift key down when restarting Excel. This seems to have solved my problem but I don't know what exactly it does to fix the issue.