“If you are a Mac user that relies on Office 2016 apps to get your day-to-day work done then you might want to hold off on upgrading to OS X El Capitan,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reports for ZDNet.
“According to an extensive thread on Microsoft’s Office for Mac support forum – combined with firsthand experience of the issue – the problems seem many and varied. Outlook appears to be the main culprit, but Excel and Word are also reported to be problematic for some,” Kingsley-Hughes reports. “For some the apps crash while in use, while for others it is coming out from sleep that causes issues.”
Kingsley-Hughes reports, “Others are finding that as soon as one app from the Office 2016 suite crashes or locks up, the others then follow suit.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft. As ill-prepared and incompetent as ever.
Meanwhile, Mail, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are working just fine for us. 100% Microsoft-free is the only way to fly!
SEE ALSO:
Microsoft’s Office 2016 for Mac is wildly unstable on OS X El Capitan – September 30, 2015
“In legend, a banshee is a fairy woman who begins to wail if someone is about to die.”
MDN has it right. The banshee, she is wailing for the death of Office.
What about Office 2011?
I’ve used Microsloth Office 11 (when forced) on El Capitan for the past couple of months with no crashes.
Outlook is the ONLY MS Office app that’s crashing. Excel, Word, etc. all working just fine (as much as MS ever works fine). Other than that I love El Cap.
I had to take all of my Outlook 2011 Exchange email and move it over to the Apple Mail app. Outlook 2011 crashes every single time I open it. Sometimes it will sync, then crash, sometimes it crashes right on startup, but it crashes every single time since the first El Cap beta. Tried every trick in the book (rebuilding db, moving files out to see what is causing it, etc.) and nothing works. Good news, the Mail app handles my Exchange mail just fine and now all of my email is in one place. Wish I’d moved it earlier 🙂
My company runs Outlook 2011 which, according to our IT folks, doesn’t work well in the El Capitan. I’m afraid I don’t know specifics, so we’ll both need to search for more details.
I use OpenOffice. I am MS Office FREE on my iMac. 😊
As much as I hate Microsoft, I hate the OpenOffice app even more. Ugh.
Some of us have no choice as the company has standardized on Microsoft Office. Oh we are told we can use other options, but there is no support and getting them to work with Exchange servers can be as big a trial as using Office!
Office for Mac 2011 has the same problems. Outlook appears to be the main culprit, and hangs up and freezes every time I try to open it.
Other programs either crash or won’t even start on El Capitan. It’s not just MS Office.
Are there any versions of Office that don’t crash. My one crashes if I dare copy anything from it at indeterminate times. Yet every other bit of software is rock solid. In some ways Microsoft can certainly be inventive.
El Capitan has a much tighter security model. One item is preventing programs/users from altering /usr. A number of Unix and Unix type programs use /usr for executables, segments, libraries, etc; modifying /usr is no longer allowed.
Unfortunately there are so many api changes that many other apps are affected as well. I am rolling back till next project.
Should I assume that Microsoft has their best programers (and biggest budget) working on their Windows software and not on their Mac team?
The *public* beta was out over a month ago. The *developers* beta, which Microsoft would’ve had access to, was available for even longer.
As one of the largest vendors of *paid* office software for Mac, Microsoft has no excuse for it to be this bad.
You can always rely on Microsoft to completely fsck it up.
Been using Office 2016 on El Capitan for months without crashing. Only problem I have is slowness, slow to load and lag using the apps. I have older hardware from 2009, but they aren’t under powered junk. Mac Pro with 12GB ram, 2.66GHZ and Mac Pro 17″ 2.93Ghz, 8GB, and both have a 500GB SSD.
Apple’s suite is great for light usage. Try doing work full time on a Mac with a normal enterprise. You can’t go Microsoft free. If you’re doing any serious work on documents or have a heavy dependency on your Mail / Calendar, you can’t just use Apple’s suite and mail.
If you’re a SMB or a home user, all day every day. If you’re in a larger organization good luck.
Office 2016 is fantastic on 10.10. Outlook is fantastic, outside of WebEx Plugin not supported but that is on Cisco. yes it does crash buy Office 11 is a disaster.
To be fair, LOTS of apps aren’t ready for prime time, including Adobe’s Creative Suite.
Still embarrassing for all publishers who couldn’t get their apps to run in the four months the Beta was available.
I use it for work. It hasn’t crashed on on me yet
Since upgrade to ‘El Capo’ its Firefox that has been crashing. Have just run the Firefox Refresh to see if it will clear. Time will tell.
My experience is that complex Excel apps with Macros or large power points that worked fine with Office 2016 under Yosemite now cause near immediate crashes with El Capitan. Similar problems with Word and complex documents. However, Office 2011 still works OK under El Capitan, as far as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word go.
I hate Outlook on any platform (have to use it at work) and don’t ever use it on my Mac. So, I can’t speak to how it works. BTW, was an early tester of Office 16 on the Mac; was pretty rough at first, but smoothed out with late builds. . But that was on Yosemite… I guess MS never bothered to download any El Captian builds and test them unlike myself (developer, part time).
i am more concerned with Apple purging the taint of Adobe (especially their usurious Creative Cloud.
)
No problems at all with Excel or Word 2016 (large double-column docxs with multiple various embedded 3rd party graphics). Don’t and have never used Outlook (which seems to be the problem).
Let’s not exaggerate the problem. God forbid Apple suffer the same embarrassment of releasing buggy software.
AutoCAD for Mac has the same issues on El Capitan. Crashes like John Denver Rocky Mountain high
No wonder the way they have programmed this shit.
Look at the content of one of these apps and you see a large number of libraries that will translate OS X calls to Windows APIs which is executed.
This both makes it much harder to keep compatible with new OS X versions, it makes the apps slower and makes for the bloat these apps have on both OS X and iOS. It potentially makes them more vulnerable too as the Windows code have inherited all the “features” from, well, you know…
I’m not surprised by this at all, but I’m also disgusted by it. Microsoft is one of Apple’s oldest developers yet they didn’t bother to make sure their apps were compatible with El Capitan. It’s clear that QA testing isn’t done at Microsoft, and if it is, the test results didn’t matter to them. Hopefully, they’re working on an update, but since it took them five years to release a new version of Office for the Mac, I’m not going to hold my breath.