Office 08 crashing - because of 04?

[beck]

I recently bought an iMac 2.8Ghz and installed Word (Office 2008) which crashes on launch. When I log in to machine under guest account Word ran its start up sequence and opened correctly.

Can anybody help? It may be partly because I initially installed Office 2004 and then removed it by sliding application folder into trash before deleting i.e. I did not run an uninstaller. However, I then installed Office 2008 clean and it does work under guest so it can’t be that bad?

I have tried deleting office plist files in library but that has not helped. I have looked at fonts and seen there are only four in ~/library/Fonts.



thanks

 

[beck]

i've had a bit more of a play and still no results, anyone have an idea?

 

[ArthurDaley]

Right - this is probably as useful as a hit on the head but let me share something.

I tried Office2008 on the Mac, it was REAL bad, crashed a lot and was slow. I tried Office2004 and it was better. But it was still too slow for my liking - if I opened up say 1500 page specs, I could not live with the speed (it was at a crawl compared to running it on Office on Windows).

I then tried iWork08 and was happy. I've had no interop. issues with people using the Office suite so hardly load Office now. (the only thing missing is Access and OneNote).

 

[telecomm]

I don't have time to look up the details, but look around for info about corrupted normal templates (this may have something to do with your problem).

 

[beck]

Thanks this is great. It works, at last! Thanks you so much. I was having a problem with the template file in office 2004 before upgrading to 2008. I found the following on the web and it now works. I actually just removed the Normal.dotm file and Word replaced it with a fresh one on start up. For some reason it suggested I run Microsoft database Utility which seemed to confuse itself more than help (not quite sure what happened with this).


From elsewhere on web..


Corrupt normal template: The normal template file — located at ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/Normal.dotm appears to be corrupt in many cases of crashing. The fix for the problem is as follows: create a new user account, launch Word 2008 under the new account (it should launch properly if this is the cause), then copy the aforementioned file from the clean (working) account to the same location in the old (crashing) account, replacing the corrupt file.