I run Outlook for Mac, mainly on a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and occasionally on a MacBook Air running Mac OS X Lion, but haven’t had this issue. Ian, sorry to hear you’re having problems with Microsoft Outlook having high CPU usage. Go to the end of the article for the fix. UPDATE – 6 Novemeber 2012: It looks like we’ve got a fix – thanks to Alastair Brown for reporting it. I would be so grateful for any help - can you advise me? I tried your suggestion for a SMC reset, but the CPU hyperactivity, the overheating, and the noisy fan persist whenever I try to run Outlook (not otherwise).
Then, to my dismay, my MBP stopped working altogether – Apple Support advised me to return it to the dealer, who found that a cable to the hard-disk was burned out - they replaced it within a day and I got my MBP back intact.
Then some days later, when the fix was released for SP2 (14.2.1), I again installed it, and then the problem of excessive noise and overheating has resumed. After 5 days I removed MS Office completely and reinstalled it without updating to SP2 and everything was fine again. The CPU activity showed that Outlook was using approx.
My MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HD, OSX Lion 10.7.4) started to be very hot and noisy (fan) immediately after I installed the Microsoft Office for Mac Service Pack 2 (14.2) update specifically whenever I ran Outlook, despite no problem with Outlook prior to this.
