Beware of Snow Leopard

Yay! There’s a new operating system for Macs. I was ecstatic — until I installed it and couldn’t open either Word or Excel 2004. Seriously?!

So I had to do some digging to discover the problem. Now that I know it, I’m sharing it so that hopefully others don’t spend an afternoon as frustrated as I was.

I got great information at this blog:
http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2009/09/hot_topics_using_office_for_mac_with_snow_leopard.html

My problem was all font-related.

I had to go to the application Font Book and manually delete all the duplicates. Just turning them off didn’t work.

Then I went to my Microsoft Word font folder and deleted a few specific fonts. Apparently, they are older and mess things up. Delete:
• Andale Mono
• Arial
• Arial Black
• Arial Narrow
• Arial Rounded Bold
• Brush Script.ttf
• Comic Sans MS
• Georgia
• Impact
• Tahoma
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Wingdings 2
• Wingdings 3

In a perfect world, everything would just work. Bummer we don’t live in a perfect world.