If you search for ways to stop the spinning wheel on Mac, the general advice is to use Force Quit to close unresponsive apps. However, this solution does not work if you need to save the document you’ve been working on for the past hour.

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All these additional features in Office for Mac are from Apple’s macOS operating system, not Microsoft. Our look at the options is from macOS Sierra but the same or similar applies to recent versions of macOS. These color selectors apply to Office 365, 2019 or 2016 for Mac, Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac and Outlook for Mac. Refresh go-to templates. The template file normal.dot is created by Microsoft Word.

If the Word or Excel suddenly hung up on the spinning wheel, the options to save the work are limited. The best course is to close other running applications in order to save Mac resources and then wait for the unresponsive app to come back.

Let’s review the steps one by one and then see what we can do to avoid this problem in the future.

Wait for the App to Finish Internal Work

When Does a Spinning Wheel Appear?

According to the Apple documentation, the spinning ball appears in two cases:

Appears when items are loading. You can still move the pointer elsewhere.
Wait cursor. Appears when a delay is more than four seconds

macOS has a process called WindowServer – the part of the OS that interacts between the applications and display. It is responsible for all drawings on the Mac display. Every app that needs to display anything on the screen communicates with WindowServer.

When a WindowServer receives a lot of requests, it shows the spinning wheel to indicate that the event cannot be displayed at the time. If the wait is longer than 4 seconds, the app will appear as non-responsive.

So, what does it mean in practice?

Wait for several minutes. Do not use Force Quit because you will lose all work you did since the last save.

In most cases, waiting is the best way to avoid losing work, when Mac freezes.

How long? It varies. If I were, I would just plug in the MacBook to the power, keep the lid open and go make myself a cup of coffee.

If the document is too large or contains external sources and there is not much RAM on your MacBook, the spinning wheel may go away by itself.

Close Applications Running on Background

This includes the applications you are running concurrently and applications running on the background.

If you are using editing a particularly big document in Word or Excel, it makes sense to close all other applications.

Clicking on ‘x’ for each application does not unload the app from the memory. Instead, quit unnecessary apps either from the menu or by using the Command+Q key combination. Make sure to save the work done in those apps before closing them.

Then start Activity Monitor and click on the CPU tab. If the system CPU is consistently higher than 50%, even when there is no other activity, it may indicate that it’s time to upgrade the CPU. CPU upgrades are also not available in the latest MacBook models.

However, occasional wheel spinning is ok when running CPU heavy applications like editing videos, especially large ones. It’s only a problem when a high CPU is sustained over a long period.

Enable Auto Save Options

Imagine if you didn’t have to worry about losing work even if the Mac gets frozen or even reboots. The best to achieve such peace of mind is by turning on an autosave option if the app has one.

Fortunately, for Microsoft Office users the feature is available. Here are the instructions for the Word app:

Click on the Word menu, and then click on Preferences.
Under Output and Sharing, click on the Save button.
Under Save Options enable “Turn on Autosave by default” option
Set every X minutes to 1, so that Word saves changes every minute

The instructions for Excel are similar, but the Save button is located under Sharing and Privacy.

Reinstall the App

If you keep getting the spinning wheel with your, then removing it first and installing it again may fix it.

If the app comes with Uninstall utility it’s best to use one. If not, use a specialized app, such as CleanMyMac or AppCleaner.

Upgrade Mac Hardware

The waits on any computer happen in three cases: when the load is currently too high (temporary issues), when the computer cannot handle a regular load (requires hardware upgrade) or when the hardware is failing (needs repair).

Recently I received an email from Ellen S. in which she described that she’s constantly seeing color wheels when using the latest version of Final Cut Pro. She has an older MacBook Air with minimal specs.

Unfortunately, her laptop was not strong enough to run such a heavy app as Final Cut Pro. So, basically, she has three options:

Upgrade MacBook. She can’t upgrade the CPU, but adding more memory could help significantly.
Buy a new MacBook, preferably Pro.
Downgrade the version of the app or use another app that required fewer resources. Usually, newer software versions require more resources, so by installing the older version, she could possibly reduce the load.

Clean the Primary Storage

Generally speaking, the disk becomes slow and unresponsive when the number of disk operations exceeds the possible disk throughput. It is very unlikely that you will be running disk heavy applications on MacBooks for a long time.

Occasional disk bottlenecks shouldn’t take too long even when they result in a spinning wheel appearance.

But there are some rules regarding improving disk performance:

External devices

If you have an external DVD drive, the applications that access it, e.g., movies, can run as fast the drive allows. Normally, DVD drives are significantly slower than RAM and even hard drives.

If you see a spinning wheel while the app is accessing the DVD, just wait until it finishes and gets back to the normal state.

Permissions problems

Finally, waits can be caused by restricted permissions. If the files that the application is trying to access internally are not allowed to be open (because permissions got messed up), the application gets stuck.

Fortunately, this particular issue was fixed in OSX El Capitan, but if you are still on the older version of macOS, it makes sense to check the permissions.

What’s Next?

Sometimes you can’t force quit a bad app because the entire Mac gets frozen. The only solution, in this case, is a hard reboot (link).

If it happens once in a while, then most likely there is nothing wrong with your computer. However, if it keeps happening too often, then perhaps you need to try more drastic measures, described in another post.

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