I have Microsoft Office and iWork on my computer. I much prefer using iWork over Microsoft Office. There is only a few instances that I would need to use Office. I was wondering if I could put Office on an external hard drive and run the program thru the external hard drive.
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Matt
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Is It Possible To Keep and Run Applications From an External Hard Drive?
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I don't think it is as easy to do this as with other apps. I haven't explored this with the latest version of Office, but in past versions there are a ton of supporting files on the Mac in the Library and Applications folders. So simply moving the apps to an external drive doesn't serve much of a purpose. You just get a little hard drive space back, and then a lot of inconvenience.
I would also imagine that perhaps you might be bugged to re-authenticate your copy of Office more often. Maybe.
And, of course, any external USB drive will be much slower than an internal one. The data has to run through USB.
What is you goal here? Is it simply to save same hard drive space? I see that the Office folder on my Mac only takes up 1.3 GB. For a 250GB drive, that's about 0.5%. So there are probably much better ways to try to free up space that won't cause you potential problems in the future.