Help! Word will not open.

[nightsky971]

For some reason, beginning this afternoon, every time I try and open Word (Office 2011, Mavericks, mid 2012 rMBP) I get a message "this version of Word is not supported by this Mac"??? PowerPoint and excel open fine. Any word documents open in Pages. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need Word everyday.

 

[blueshirt31]

Do you have all updates installed? Open either Excel or PowerPoint and go to Help menu -> Check for updates. Install all available updates.

Latest update for MS Office is available from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2889496

In worst case try reinstalling the software.

 

[nightsky971]

Thanks for the suggestion...but it is fully up to date.

 

[blueshirt31]

Oh well...

Just in case...new update has been released today: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2902808

It states this change:

Improves functionality in Word for Mac.
This update fixes an issue that causes a crash when you start Polish Microsoft Word 2011 on OS X Mavericks.


If this does not solve your issue try logging in as different user (maybe as a Guest) and see if you can open Word. If that doesn't help...try following suggestions in the last post:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...avericks/3d586c97-2972-43b3-8172-40018d60a214

Edit: Can you try removing ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.microsoft.Word.savedState

 

[nightsky971]

I appreciate the ideas. I will try them in the morning.

 

[nightsky971]

Very strange. I noticed this morning that I had the same issue with ibooks and pixelmator. Both would not open saying they were "not supported by this mac". Installing the Word update you linked to from yesterday allowed me to open Word again. Repairing permissions and rebooting fixed pixelmator and ibooks.

Any thoughts on what could have caused this?

 

[blueshirt31]

I am glad that all is well now.

Honestly, that error message would prompt me to think the app is outdated and not compatible with the OS. With Office that would not be too strange. Applying the latest updates available should resolve the any compatibility issues. It was strange that of all apps it was just a Word issue.

I must admit that I have less than great experience with Mavericks. Nothing major to stop it using, but it is rather buggy compared to Lion and ML. I have had a few strange issues with Mavericks itself and I am hoping 10.9.2 will be a bigger update and actually fix some bugs. I have 10.9.1 and all they seem to be focused on is getting Gmail working with Mail. Not a kind of release I hoped for. Some 3rd party apps do seem to struggle with Mavericks, even though they have been updated for it. Developers state they are tracking issues and usually report it as Mavericks issue rather than the app itself. One can't really be sure what is going on here. New release, problems to be expected. Hoping Apple and third party developers will speed things up and start fixing things. This is why I am not a huge fan of annual releases.