It happens most aggravatingly when I go to change fonts, which I have to do often for my work-work (creating translations of documents) My Fontbook isn't on my external. It's on my internal drive. There's no flipping reason why MS Word should need to spool up my external drive, while I wait, getting frustrated, for it to find my fonts where they always are on any flipping Mac. Anyone know how to either make it not spool up the external, or point it to the dedicated folder for fonts and have it never, ever, ever, ever look somewhere else for something that doesn't belong anywhere else? Thanks, Hates MS Word with a Passion, Jr.
Click Go and open Library\Preferences\Microsoft\Office and look to see where the font cache for Word is located? I don't know.
Unsure whether the word prefs go into such detail (and give you the control) as to where they poke around by default when looking for something. You could bob into system prefs>energy saver prefs and stop the disk from 'spinning down' in the first place, or unmount it while in word.
It's also possible that the config file(s) for either Word or Office are on that external drive. If this is the case, as @SethLoki, suggested, unmount the external drive, start Word and see if it gives you grief. If so, you'll have to devise some way to figure out which part of your config is stored there. The other possibility, and far more likely, is that Word is touching base with temp files on the external drive. This action seems to be random, so you'll have to talk to Microsoft Office Support to get to the bottom of it.
