Comments on: Office 2008: the Microsoft User Data folder

By: laurie

laurie — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:25:24 +0000

That’s genius, ta very much buddy!

By: MikeD

MikeD — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:17:36 +0000

Just a follow up on your nice little structural lesson. Although I agree with the structural setup and it should be within the Application Support directory under the current users library. I think most people here are coming for a solution to hide the thing so they do not see it in their normal gui. Here is a way to hide the folder (this will only work if you are not showing hidden files)

chflags hidden “~/Documents/Microsoft Office User Data”

By: Steven

Steven — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:15:26 +0000

Greetings from Manchester UK

I installed office yesterday and noticed the folder and quite a new be to the world of Mac was amazed how to fix the glitch!

Totally impressed

Cheers

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:45:02 +0000

That’s what I thought, thanks for the confirmation and quick response!

By: Daenney

Daenney — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:19:07 +0000

The arrow indeed indicates that it is a symlink or any other kind of shortcut.

You do need to leave it in the Documents folder. If you remove it from there, a new Microsoft User Data folder will be created in your Documents folder whenever you start an Office application as it is required and its location apparently hard-coded into the MS Office Suite.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:26:22 +0000

I’m new to a Mac, so forgive me if this is an obvious question. I went through the first command, and it seemed to make a copy of the folder in the specified location. When I went back into my Documents folder via Finder, it still showed the folder in there. The MS User data folder in the Documents folder does have an arrow at the bottom, is that indicating the symlink, and if so, will I have to leave that folder in Documents? Thanks again for posting this, it will definitely help to keep my system organized.

By: Daenney

Daenney — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:18:02 +0000

Actually, that is where the second command comes in, the ln -s bit. That should create a symlink but I see I made a mistake there.

The command should have been:
ln -s ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/User\ Data/ ~/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

My mistake, I assumed you would already be in the Documents folder when applying that command but of course that doesn’t have to be the case.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:13:08 +0000

It moves it to the library, but when word is reopened a new “Microsoft User Data” folder is created in the documents folder. How do I apply that code permanently?

Thanks for your help!

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:32:14 +0000

Thanks!

By: Daenney

Daenney — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:34:39 +0000

Yes