HELP ! MS Office 2008 Refuses to open 10.6.1

[Beaverfish]

Hey,

After installing a fresh copy of Snow Leopard onto my Macbook Pro I reinstalled Ms Office 2008 from the CD only to find that every time i open it, it crashes straight away. The only one that works in entourage which runs absolutely fine !!

If found a few threads in the forums about using illegal copies and Microsoft blocking it. However im using a fully paid for 3 user version of office.

Ive tried deleting the files found in

• ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

and used a different serial code. however the problem still persists.

ive even tried installing from a different disc and it still doesn't work.

Please help.

 

[roadbloc]

ive had the very same problem. and it's convinced me to buy iwork.

MS office is a pile of rubbish compared to iwork. iwork runs seamlessly, without always wanting to check for MORE updates, crashing, using a gig of your ram and just basically confusing you with the compatibility errors.

Get iwork or the free alternative openoffice. trust me. you wont regret it.

 

[yellow]

And have you downloaded and installed all the Office 2008 patches?

 

[dbwie]

Did you run Microsoft Auto Update to install any updates/patches for the version that is installed from the disc? There may have been some small updates which improve Snow Leopard compatibility. Office 2008 is working OK for me on my Snow Leopard machine, but I did the upgrade install rather than the clean install of the OS.

Question: did it work OK in 10.6.0?

 

[Beaverfish]

Did you run Microsoft Auto Update to install any updates/patches for the version that is installed from the disc? There may have been some small updates which improve Snow Leopard compatibility. Office 2008 is working OK for me on my Snow Leopard machine, but I did the upgrade install rather than the clean install of the OS.

Question: did it work OK in 10.6.0?

Yeah it didn't work with 10.6 either and I also tried it with all the patches and stuff installed.

The strange thing is, I installed snow leopard on my mac mini, and just did a plain upgrage, and office worked absolutly fine!

 

[Beaverfish]

ive had the very same problem. and it's convinced me to buy iwork.

MS office is a pile of rubbish compared to iwork. iwork runs seamlessly, without always wanting to check for MORE updates, crashing, using a gig of your ram and just basically confusing you with the compatibility errors.

Get iwork or the free alternative openoffice. trust me. you wont regret it.

I have iWork too, but I like to have the best of both worlds, I also find office very useful for college which is heavily windows orientated.

 

[CWallace]

Do you have an backup of your

• ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

under Leopard?

When I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard and a fresh install of Office 2008 from my retail CD with my license code, it whined that the application was already in use / registered / somethingorother and wouldn't let me launch.

So I coped those two files over from my Time Machine backup and all is well.

 

[Beaverfish]

Do you have an backup of your

• ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

under Leopard?

When I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard and a fresh install of Office 2008 from my retail CD with my license code, it whined that the application was already in use / registered / somethingorother and wouldn't let me launch.

So I coped those two files over from my Time Machine backup and all is well.

I just tried using the files from my other snow leopard install that works. but it didn't fix it !!!

 

[monokakata]

When you say "fresh copy," do you mean a clean install, or a fresh re-do of an upgrade?

And after whatever install it might have been, have you installed the 10.6.1 upgrade?

I had a great deal of trouble, and not just with Word. I did an upgrade rather than clean install, and after that much of the time anything that required the file open pane would crash. Anything! So for example, if I tried to attach an image to an email in Mac Mail, boom, goodbye. Dragging it in would work.

This was on my Mac Pro. My MBP misbehaved before 10.6.1 but not after. The Mac Pro's problems were unaffected by 10.6.1, so it seemed clear to me that buried down there somewhere was something left over from who knows when. The MP started life as a Tiger machine and has not had a clean upgrade ever (because it always worked properly).

It was clear that much of this was SL's fault (I talked to a developer about it) and it had to do with the open pane, no matter whose application was calling for the open pane.

In my case, 10.6.1 fixed the open pane problem for everything except Word and Excel. Since I depend heavily on these applications, this was pretty bad for me.

Finally I did a clean install of SL and MS Office 2008 (and all my other apps, too), and the problem is gone completely. I did NOT use TM to reinstall my apps, because I didn't want to bring back possibly-bad preferences and who knows what else.

So if you didn't do a complete clean install, I recommend that you try it. It's a headache, but it might solve your problem.