I'm sorry that sounds like jibberish to me. i just loaded up office on my computer. what is this suitcase business?
Sorry about that.
If you're not having issues with Office, then the quest for a solution is irrelevent.
If, however, it is causing you problems with long loading times and ridiculous delays in accessing the 'font' menu within the application, the solution I proposed is of a sound basis and has now been proven to work. I would also testify that just as Office 2008 is supposed to be testably faster than Office 2004 or Office X, on my system, it is, now that I've fixed the problem.
To give you background to the solution:
a font is a system-level file which specifies a typeface as I'm sure you know. An application may effectively 'cache' the available font files in order to access them for use within the application. This is no problem to application OR computer if you are running on just the standard stock of system fonts. This is why the solution I offered is probably exclusively relevent to the larger proportion of Mac users who are creatives.
Typically, creatives in the graphics/design field and publishing business and the like will be using a multiplicity of typefaces rather than the 'staple' stock fonts supplied with the Mac system and/or any applications that include custom fonts. This ALWAYS caused a problem because the more fonts you have the more system files the system has to cache, and the more font files the applications have to cache, especially problematic if you're using applications which show the name of the font IN the style of the font (WYSIWYG font menus - which is an option by default in Office 2008). The loading of multiple font files can cause long load times, clogged memory, crashed applications, and that's without worrying about whether the fonts are corrupt. In my experience, a corrupt font can bring a system crashing faster than bad RAM.
The solution to this problem, amongst the wealth of 'FontDoctor' type programs, was a font management solution. This is where applications like Extensis Suitcase Fusion come in to the mix. At the simplest level, instead of putting your fonts in the system fonts folder, you leave them in an easy to find directory, and then hand them to Suitcase. Suitcase keeps a log of where your fonts are, and can even check them to make sure they're not corrupt, and then, when you want to use a particular font (or font set) you can go to Suitcase and 'activate' just that one font, or more than one, or a whole set, and it temporarily makes the font available to the system with a single click, instead of moving fonts in and out of the system folder manually. Using this method you can preview and select the fonts you want to use without having hundreds or thousands of files clogging up your system.
Suitcase also includes 'plug ins' for popular apps like Illustrator, InDesign and Quark so that when you open a file which uses fonts that aren't in the system folder, Suitcase automatically finds and opens them in order for you to open and edit the document in question.
The only reason to have lots of fonts in the system fonts folder is because you intend to use lots of fonts. If you intend to use lots of fonts then you are probably a creative, and should get used to the idea of maintaining an efficient ship. System clag is no good when you just want to use fonts occasionally on a case by case basis. Using a font management tool is good housekeeping for the task in hand.
Now, part of the complication can be the incorporation of FontBook in the MacOS by Apple - their attempt to make the Mac system a one-stop creative powerhouse. Unfortunately FontBook, while having some useful features, is just not as flexible or powerful as Suitcase and one of the things that it appears to do is to take activated fonts and dump them in the system fonts folder for easy access, unless you tell it not to do so (in application preferences.) Even with Suitcase installed, there are a number of situations in which FontBook could be activated and start reorganising fonts, and in this case I found that either FontBook and Office 2008 between them, or FontBook and another application, had located a directory of archived fonts in a remote part of my hard drive, and just added the whole lot to the system's list of available fonts, including corrupt fonts and old fonts and stuff due for a clear out.
When Word is loading up, notice that it hovers for a while on 'optimising font menu' on the splash screen. You'll see from that just how the Mac OS and these Mac applications make font handling a priority. When I noticed that Word was taking a REALLY long time over this and was throwing up an attempt to make Suitcase activate a font that I had never loaded in to Suitcase, in a location that Suitcase should not have known about, I knew that fonts were at the root of my problems.
There are about 28 base System fonts in a Mac System, and with the extended fonts available on the typical system there should be no more than a couple of hundred or so available at system level at any one time. When I examined my user level fonts folder I had over 1200 fonts in there, all listed in FontBook, with Suitcase only recognising them because they had been moved to the system folder. In my case, this is the issue. When I removed everything that was not a system level font, deleted it all (which also took a bit of time for the system to sift) and then restarted the computer in order to clear the cached files, Word and Excel loaded in a flash.
It might not be everyone's solution because it might not apply to everyone in their font usage, but the fact remains that a recurrent problem, solved by a singular deliberate course of action, indicates that the solution was indeed on the right lines.
To check this on your machine, if you're having problems like I was having, just use the Finder to go to MacintoshHD>Library>Fonts and you should probably have 200-300 fonts in there as a file count. Now use the finder to go to your user account and look in Library>Fonts. In my case I had over 1200 in there. I can't see too many valid reasons why, if you're a single user on the machine and you use a font management tool, you should have ANY fonts in there at all, certainly not 1200. If you find you've got hundreds in there too, what I'd do is this... create a new folder on the desktop and call it something memorable like 'Archived Font Files' and drag all the fonts in User>Library>Fonts into the new Archive folder, so you've not lost them, just moved them, and can move them back if the solution is a no-go. Now, simply restart the machine, and when it has booted try running Word or Excel, and see if there's an improvement.
If there isn't, nothing lost, and move the fonts back where they were if you feel you need them. If it IS a solution, then you need to really think about whether you might want to invest in Extensis Suitcase (you can also download a trial of it and test to see if you think it does help solve your issue, and you can buy a serial number for the application in order to activate it during the demo period so as to avoid reinstalls), and if you do, just drag and drop the 'Archived Font Files' directory into the Suitcase application window, and you can now use Suitcase to switch the old fonts on and off at will, and even better, you can now preview the fonts too, really easily, using the same application, and even print tables of font samples to see how they look on paper.
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