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El Capitan - MS Office

MainStream

MainStream

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 20, 2010
60
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Is anyone else having issues with MS Office products working with El Capitan? I have multiple times daily where the little rainbow colored ball just spins and spins and spins. I can't access force quit, I can't get the icons on the dock to respond all I can do is reboot. This happens on both my iMac and Macbook Pro. Running the latest version of OS X on both and have installed the latest MS updates on both. Any advise would be appreciated.
 
@MainStream, what version of Office are we talking about? That will be beneficial to know. Also need to know your system information including memory, free drive space / total drive capacity and anything else that could helpful in answering the question.
 
MainStream, what version of Office are we talking about? That will be beneficial to know. Also need to know your system information including memory, free drive space / total drive capacity and anything else that could helpful in answering the question.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Office 2016 using Office 365 subscription on both the iMac and Macbook Pro. 27" iMac with 16GB of Ram and a 2TB Fusion drive that I purchased new last October. The MacBook Pro is a 13" retina early 2015 with 8GB Ram and a 512GB SSD.
 
Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete (ooops, sorry, I couldn't resist)

Anyway, weird that would happen on both Macs. I use the "boxed" version of Office 2016 and have no problems, but that's of no use to you either. I've never used subscription software so this may be a stupid question — can you uninstall, reboot, then reinstall Office? I spent way too many years working in a Windows environment; that's one of the tricks that would occasionally make apps work the way Microsoft said they would. Probably won't work on a Mac, but you never know.
 
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a) didn't know there was an update/upgrade from 2011 that did not require Office 365 subscriptions and b) I've got nothing because we've stopped at Office 2008 ( have 2011 but she didn't like it ).
 
@cincygolfgrrl - It is possible to delete and reinstall Office 2016 with an Office 365 subscription. I will give that a try and report back after a few days to see if that eliminated/reduced the problem.
 
MainStream said:
Is anyone else having issues with MS Office products working with El Capitan? I have multiple times daily where the little rainbow colored ball just spins and spins and spins. I can't access force quit, I can't get the icons on the dock to respond all I can do is reboot. This happens on both my iMac and Macbook Pro. Running the latest version of OS X on both and have installed the latest MS updates on both. Any advise would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
[doublepost=1454423127][/doublepost]Just to contribute a long post to the thread:
I was Office:Mac2011 and due to employer upgrade of Exchange Server, I went ahead and upgraded to Office 2016 (v 15.18). I've downloaded the latest updates from Microsoft for the whole office suite.

My mac is iMac 27" 3.4GHz i7 mid-2011 with 16GB RAM running OS X El Capitan 10.11.3.
My laptop is a PowerBook 2009 with 4 GB RAM running OS X El Capitan 10.11.3 but I only use pages/etc and there is no microsoft product on it at all.

What I've found:
1. The laptop works great with the El Capitan upgrade. I use web browsers for email and web content surfing. I use Keynote to present lectures (even in ppt format). Photos and iTunes work fine.

2. The iMac, which is newer, has a higher performance processor and more memory is a MESS! When I switch windows between non-microsoft and microsoft applications or between microsoft applications or even between the mail reading window and the calendar windows in Outlook, I regularly get the SBBD (Spinning Beach Ball of Death). I've tried a variety of things to fix and to no avail. I really don't want to completely remove all Microsoft software and then do a completely new and "clean" reinstall of Office 2016 as that would cause me to lose my locally-stored email archive folders which I use to manage several dozen projects.

i've looked at a wide variety of websites and there seems to be consensus that this is a huge problem that microsoft is aware of, but that there appears to be little fix for. The fact that 10.11.3 runs just fine on my laptop with no SBBD, but when I have Microsoft software installed on my iMac with 10.11.3 (basically overall the same setups except microsoft), my imac keeps hanging for 10-120 seconds.

Very frustrating and thanks for letting me vent. I wish i hadn't upgraded to el capitan or office 2016. it would just mean losing email client access to the exchange server at work.

best regards everyone and good luck,
dudarro
 
dudarro said:
[doublepost=1454423127][/doublepost]
[…]
2. The iMac, which is newer, has a higher performance processor and more memory is a MESS! When I switch windows between non-microsoft and microsoft applications or between microsoft applications or even between the mail reading window and the calendar windows in Outlook, I regularly get the SBBD (Spinning Beach Ball of Death). I've tried a variety of things to fix and to no avail. I really don't want to completely remove all Microsoft software and then do a completely new and "clean" reinstall of Office 2016 as that would cause me to lose my locally-stored email archive folders which I use to manage several dozen projects.
[…]
Click to expand...

I pulled this portion of your post because I, too, have Office 2016 on a newer, high-performance iMac. I've experienced none of the issues you have. I think my saving grace is I only use Excel, the rest of the Office suite is just taking up disk space. I wouldn't be surprised if Outlook is the prime culprit. I was a long-time Windows user, back when I had a job (tee-hee), I think Outlook was responsible for most of the crashes I experienced. It was the most resource-intensive application I used.
 
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So, I deleted MS Office 2016 for Mac on both my MacBook Pro and iMac and then reinstalled directly from the Office 365 web site. I was been traveling Monday - Wednesday using just the MacBook Pro. It was better but still had an occasional spinning beach ball where I had to re-boot. Back in the office today and using my IMac and I have had to reboot 7 times between 7:30 and 5:25. I believe @cincygollfgrrl is right and that most problems tie back to Outlook. I am going to quit using Outlook for the next week and see what happens. #trulyfrustrating
 
I have a 2011 iMac with 16gb running El Capitan's latest version. I've been running the standalone version of Office 2016 for one week. No issues with install. No issues with operation either. I like it better than Office 2011 as its smoother, faster and with some little functional aspects that just work better. I also have a MacBook with Office 2011. I used it yesterday and will be upgrading it too as the differences really became clear.
 
I did'nt think that MS could make a worse product than Office 2011 (esp. Outlook 2011) but it seems they have.

Glad to hear that at least the updates have solved it for one user here.
 
Given that it was basically 8+ years since MS made a a major update to Office for Mac, I can't imagine why any Mac user would subscribe to Office 365 instead of just spending $149 for the stand-alone suite (or $229 if you need Outlook).
 
To be truthful I was familiar with the 3-finger salute based on earlier versions of Windows. Windows 7 Professional does not always require it. Have used it a time or two but not like I did in previous versions of Windows.

Never knew about the OS X version of that. Did the CTRL-CMD-EJECT and was amazed at the speed this happened. Maybe next time I'll Google the commands and not just be like my cats and try something. :D
 
Last edited:
JSC said:
I have a 2011 iMac with 16gb running El Capitan's latest version. I've been running the standalone version of Office 2016 for one week. No issues with install. No issues with operation either. I like it better than Office 2011 as its smoother, faster and with some little functional aspects that just work better. I also have a MacBook with Office 2011. I used it yesterday and will be upgrading it too as the differences really became clear.
Click to expand...

Update. Outlook 2016 was using 15-25% of my CPU. It didn't interfere with performance too much. However once I deleted Office 2011, which was not in use, the CPU usage dropped to virtually nothing.
 
cincygolfgrrl said:
That's true, but hardly any of us will ever have need to use any of them, whereas Windows users are, of necessity, intimately familiar with their three-finger.
Click to expand...
I never need to use them, but do use them by preference, versus using the mouse, going to the Apple menu, and selecting Restart or Shutdown. It is much quicker. But I understand your point.
 
Update:
I am now up and running on the latest OS 10.11.x and Office 2016 (home use program license due to employers site license).
Everyone's situation is probably different, but my solution for my mid-2011 27" iMac was a new 1TB SSD from OWC.

Details:
I used a variety of tools to look at the computer. The console was able to show me a specific disk error that I discovered was the original disk going bad. I replaced the disk: formerly a spinning 1 TB HDD, now an OWC 1 TB SSD.

While I was getting that done, I went ahead and upgraded the ram from 16 to 32GB.

And now my iMac is blazingly fast. PRoblems solved.

Thanks for everyone else's comments,they were helpful.
 
The only culprit with O365 nowadays is the ancient Lync client. Oh my godness...
 
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