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saintforlife

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
1,045
329
Does the MS Office for Mac work well with Lion? Are there any compatibility issues? It runs great on my Snow Leopard now, but I read somewhere that it has some issues with Lion. If that is true, it may stop me from upgrading to Lion until the bugs are ironed out.
 

Abazigal

Contributor
Jul 18, 2011
19,454
21,842
Singapore
I face the same issues with Lion as I did on SL - namely that word has a small tendency to hang/crash when I work on large documents of 50+ pages.

So if it works fine on SL for you, it should work just as well on Lion. :)
 

johnhurley

macrumors 6502a
Aug 29, 2011
777
56
Does the MS Office for Mac work well with Lion? Are there any compatibility issues? It runs great on my Snow Leopard now, but I read somewhere that it has some issues with Lion. If that is true, it may stop me from upgrading to Lion until the bugs are ironed out.

I have had zero problems with it on my new macbook air.
 

waynep

macrumors 6502
Dec 31, 2009
434
0
I installed Office 2011 on my MBP when it had Snow Leopard. I did the app store upgrade to Lion and have never had a crash or any trouble with office, before or after upgrading to Lion.

wayne
 

Windowsrefugee

macrumors regular
Mar 14, 2011
161
7
Microsoft Land
I face the same issues with Lion as I did on SL - namely that word has a small tendency to hang/crash when I work on large documents of 50+ pages.

So if it works fine on SL for you, it should work just as well on Lion. :)

Overall, Office works fine most of the time. However, I have been having a similar problem for the past year with both a new fully loaded mid 2011 running Lion as well as a fully loaded late 2010 MBA running SL. With large Word documents, the memory completely fills up and then it crashes. I have talked to Apple and MS multiple times but never found a solution. Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution other than a different word processor.
 

arfer

macrumors newbie
Dec 2, 2011
4
0
Compatibility with incoming word and excel

When I try to open and word or excel document, using office for mac 2011, I just get either a blank document or empty tables. I have Lion installed.

Any help/suggestions welcome, Regards, Arfer.
 

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
...

Any help/suggestions welcome, Regards, Arfer.
The overwhelming majority of Office 2011 users including this one have no trouble with their installations. The fact that you are not among our number means that something unusual is amiss with your installation. If you want more than wild @$$ guesses, then you will have to give some information about your system and installation.
 

arfer

macrumors newbie
Dec 2, 2011
4
0
Compatibility with incoming word and excel

The overwhelming majority of Office 2011 users including this one have no trouble with their installations. The fact that you are not among our number means that something unusual is amiss with your installation. If you want more than wild @$$ guesses, then you will have to give some information about your system and installation.

Thanks for your interest.
I am sure the problem is probably down to me!
I use a macbook (around 2008) with Lion (10.7.2), ilife 09 and the 2011 version of Office. Whenever I try to open a Word attachment it does not show any text. I can open it in Pages but with minor format changes. The same applies with Excel. Again I can open with Numbers. I have tried various .suffixes but without success. I can generate Word docs which can be opened by the recipient.
I know that is not a lot to go on but is worth a try.
 

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
... I have tried various .suffixes but without success. ...
OK. The suffix is part of the name. Shakespeare wrote: "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." This means that changing the name does not change the file type. There are, however, some applications that explicitly handle different extensions differently. GUI-based operating systems often use the extension to associate files with applications. The extension is one [but not the only] criteria used by MacOS X. It sounds like your files are improperly associated:
  1. Within the Finder, select a traditional Word .doc file.
  2. Select File/Get Info.
  3. Locate the Opens with: popup menu.
  4. Select Microsoft Word.
  5. Press Change All....
  6. Repeat Steps 1 through 5 with an XML-based Word .docx file.
  7. Repeat Steps 1 through 6 with Excel and PowerPoint files.
There are special circumstances. However, the only non-special circumstance that calls for changing the extension is when Safari or some other application explicitly appends an extension to a downloaded file. In such a case, it is OK to remove the appended extension.
 

arfer

macrumors newbie
Dec 2, 2011
4
0
OK. The suffix is part of the name. Shakespeare wrote: "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." This means that changing the name does not change the file type. There are, however, some applications that explicitly handle different extensions differently. GUI-based operating systems often use the extension to associate files with applications. The extension is one [but not the only] criteria used by MacOS X. It sounds like your files are improperly associated:
  1. Within the Finder, select a traditional Word .doc file.
  2. Select File/Get Info.
  3. Locate the Opens with: popup menu.
  4. Select Microsoft Word.
  5. Press Change All....
  6. Repeat Steps 1 through 5 with an XML-based Word .docx file.
  7. Repeat Steps 1 through 6 with Excel and PowerPoint files.
There are special circumstances. However, the only non-special circumstance that calls for changing the extension is when Safari or some other application explicitly appends an extension to a downloaded file. In such a case, it is OK to remove the appended extension.




Apologies but I tried a number of different documents and each time ended up with either blank pages or pages with a few horizontal lines.
One last try ?
 

arfer

macrumors newbie
Dec 2, 2011
4
0
Another recourse is to post one of your problematic files here or a link to it to this forum. The members can take a look at it.

MisterMe -- Solved it !!
When I upgraded to Lion from Snow leopard some files were duplicated, in particular the fonts. This prevented any text from being displayed. Both Word and Excel now appear to be working correctly.
Thanks for your time.
 

monokakata

macrumors 68020
May 8, 2008
2,035
582
Ithaca, NY
. . . With large Word documents, the memory completely fills up and then it crashes. I have talked to Apple and MS multiple times but never found a solution. Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution other than a different word processor.

How large? I have two versions of a 1,079 page (about 326,000 words) Word (2011) document up right now, with Track Changes and many changes, and they are both doing fine. They have no complex formatting, though. It's on an early Mac Pro with 5 gigs of memory, and I have about 960 mb free.

I'm aware that "I don't have this problem" doesn't help you. But I'd like to know how big your document is.
 

Jayp03

macrumors newbie
Jun 26, 2010
29
0
I have a problem with Office 2011. Whenever I use gestures on macbook, on any of the programs, it crashes consistently.

Does anyone happen to know a fix for this?
 

miz-mdk

macrumors newbie
Nov 26, 2011
12
2
Excel for Mac 2011 very slow

Re Lion compatibility issues: I have recently been trying out Excel 2011. Of course there is a learning curve, and I am not an Exc-pert, but when I have had several sheets going in a workbook, it gets aggravatingly slow. If I copy a sheet to another workbook and delete it from the original one, the sheets I have left in the original workbook seem to go much faster. The sheets I am working on have 600-700 rows and 12-24 columns - good-sized for me but not huge by Excel standards. I would say it is generally slower than Excel in Windows or OpenOffice. I have had some crashes. There is also an issue with Excel trying to open every file of every type in my computer, but I found a fix for this. There are some features lacking that I wish were there, other new ones that I like, but this is not a compatibility issue. Surprisingly, I actually like using "the ribbon" for the most part - I don't generally like it in Windows Office.
 
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