Why doesn't the restored window come to the front?
August 15, 2010 11:59 AM   Subscribe

My wife has a Macbook with OS 10.5.7 that she got from her school (she's a teacher). Sometimes she'll have a number of word documents open and some of them will be minimized. She'll be looking at a word document and decide she wants to restore one of the minimized word documents, but when she does, the window she restores goes behind the window that's open instead of coming to the front.

The focus will be on the window she just restored, but the window that was already up will be on top of the restored window. My wife will restore the minimized window, the window will be on top for a fraction of a second, but then the old window will jump in front of the restored window. In order for her to look at the restored window, she has to click on the old window - so that the focus shifts there - and then click on the window she wanted in the first place.

It's not the end of the world, but it's an annoyance for her to do that every time she restores a window. I tried it with other programs - Firefox for instance - but the behavior only seems to be with Word. We tried to Google search as well, but couldn't come up with a good short phrase that would get us answers to our problem instead of pull up results for something else. Does anyone have any idea about how to fix this? Thanks!
posted by SeeTheTurtle to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I've noticed a bunch of weird window behavior with Word. It just seems to be another symptom of Microsoft's on again/off again commitment to the Mac. My hunch is that this is just Word being Word, and there's not much you can do, but I would start by making sure that Word is fully updated. There are also known incompatibilities like this between Word and Spaces (virtual desktops), so if she uses Spaces, that could be the problem.

Also, I would look into seeing if she can upgrade to OS 10.6.x (Snow Leopard). The update is cheap and addresses a lot of fit and polish issues, along with making everything speedier. For what it's worth, I don't have this issue on 10.6.4 with Word fully updated, but your mileage my vary. If her school will let her upgrade, it's very much worthwhile.
posted by zachlipton at 12:22 PM on August 15, 2010


I haven't been able to find a permanent fix for this either. The easiest way I've found to deal with it it is to switch Spaces momentarily and then go back.
posted by lilac girl at 12:45 PM on August 15, 2010


Upgrading to 10.6 and/or disabling spaces will fix a lot of the issues, but I've pretty much given up on Office for Mac.
posted by dreadpiratesully at 2:30 PM on August 15, 2010


Alas, upgrading to 10.6 doesn't work because that's what I'm running and have had the same problem. The only fix I found was disable Spaces, unfortunately.
posted by smirkette at 2:44 PM on August 15, 2010


Try Open Office instead of Office.
posted by empath at 8:52 PM on August 15, 2010


Word just behaves badly. It doesn't work very well with expose, either. Wish I had a solution for you!
posted by leahwrenn at 9:47 PM on August 15, 2010


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