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retta283

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Jun 8, 2018
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For a number of reasons I am reliant on Outlook 2016 and to a lesser extent Excel and Word 2016. These apps are the main reason I use my 2010 iMac, and I'd love to run them on my 17" MBP or even a 2006 iMac running Mavericks with the patcher. Obviously the support minimum is 10.10 for 2016 but there isn't much underlying technology in the apps that relies on 10.10 feature set. It makes me wonder if there is a way to get around this minimum or if it is hard-coded. If anyone has tried this with other apps or knows what tweaks are required to proceed I'd appreciate it if you could share. I have seen on Apple discussion that some people were able to get it to install on Mavericks, but not any specific steps.
 
Oooh! I haven't used Office in years, but if someone else got Office 2016 working before, it can be done again!

I'm just blindly guessing here because I don't know anything about Office for Mac... if it comes as a .pkg, one of the first things I would do is extract the contents:

Code:
pkgutil --expand /path/to/installer.pkg /path/to/output-directory

Then go into the output directory. You will probably want to add a .zip extension to the large "Payload" file and extract it.

Now you can look at what's actually in the installer, and possibly copy the files to the right locations directly, or otherwise edit them as needed.

Past that point, I'd need more details!
 
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I should've mentioned this in my original post that the problem isn't installing per se, it's running the apps themselves. Office 2016 surprisingly has few dependencies beyond the apps themselves, enough so that when I've put Office 2016 on a new Mac I've just copied the apps, upon launch the Library files create themselves again.

I was able to change the info.plist file to 10.9, and after that launching it still gives me an error, but it's nonspecific to required version. I will upload the error it gives when I can get to a Mavericks machine later.
 
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Perhaps not possible... I tried to change some stuff and nothing was working, oddly the info.plist for this is scrambled so editing it breaks it completely. Trying to launch from the actual process throws up this error.
 
What specifically about office 2016 do you need? 2013 runs on Mavericks.
Libreoffice/openoffice could potentially compile on mavericks too with the source code.

You’ve pretty much done everything I would’ve thought of to try and get it to launch..It looks like it’s missing some dependency. That’s the problem with closed source software.
 
What specifically about office 2016 do you need? 2013 runs on Mavericks.
Libreoffice/openoffice could potentially compile on mavericks too with the source code.

You’ve pretty much done everything I would’ve thought of to try and get it to launch..It looks like it’s missing some dependency. That’s the problem with closed source software.
2013? I believe you mean Office 2011. There was never a 2013 version for Mac, only with 2016 did the two OSes reach release parity.

Outlook 2011 is sorry and the main reason is that most of my add-ins are not compatible, and Security standards for certain providers do not work with 2011. Personally the UI is much better as well in Excel/Outlook.

It probably does have some OS dependency which is a shame because they aren't particularly complicated apps.

If the Windows version of 2016 is possible to work through Wine it may be worth looking into although I'm not sure how activation would go.
 
Have you tried changing the system version of the Mac itself?


This was the first trick we leveraged so many years back to make Dropbox continue to work on Leopard.


Just do NOT reboot before changing the system version back!!!!
 
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Still fails. Changed both and it errors out like that. Oddly enough though doing this presents the option to download iPhoto 9.6.1 from the App Store, but I don't want to destroy my current copy if it messes up.
 
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Still fails. Changed both and it errors out like that. Oddly enough though doing this presents the option to download iPhoto 9.6.1 from the App Store, but I don't want to destroy my current copy if it messes up.
Office 2016 relies on OS features that don't exist in Mavericks. No amount of changing plists is going to fix that.
 
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Office 2016 relies on OS features that don't exist in Mavericks. No amount of changing plists is going to fix that.
Evidenced in post #5 that there are framework dependencies that are missing but still tried that version trick out of good faith. The Apple discussion I read gave me hope but obviously was lies.
 
2013? I believe you mean Office 2011. There was never a 2013 version for Mac, only with 2016 did the two OSes reach release parity.

Outlook 2011 is sorry and the main reason is that most of my add-ins are not compatible, and Security standards for certain providers do not work with 2011. Personally the UI is much better as well in Excel/Outlook.

It probably does have some OS dependency which is a shame because they aren't particularly complicated apps.

If the Windows version of 2016 is possible to work through Wine it may be worth looking into although I'm not sure how activation would go.
I probably should’ve read this further than the first post...I didn’t even know that.

You could install Windows 7 in a VM. The latest version of Office for Windows I’ve used in WINE is 2007 and it worked fine. I never bothered to even acquire a newer version as 2007 works fine. Parallels will allow for pretty seamless integration with the app; similar to how it feels using classic. I’m pretty sure virtual box added that feature too.
 
You could install Windows 7 in a VM.
It's not a good idea to keep using Win 7 in environments where it'll connect to the internet. The good news is that Win 10 will run indefinitely without ever having been activated, so there's no reason to not just use that.
 
It's not a good idea to keep using Win 7 in environments where it'll connect to the internet. The good news is that Win 10 will run indefinitely without ever having been activated, so there's no reason to not just use that.
The same is true about running Mavericks so I figured it was a non-issue for you.
But yes Windows 10 would work as well; natively or in a VM.

Windows 7 can be fooled to update much like XP was. Though I haven’t done it I’m sure it isn’t too hard.
 
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Perhaps not possible... I tried to change some stuff and nothing was working, oddly the info.plist for this is scrambled so editing it breaks it completely. Trying to launch from the actual process throws up this error.
Yeah, the person on Apple Communities was either confused or lying. This isn't the sort of thing you'd just up and fix without also saying how, it's not simple!

The central problem is that Office is expecting CoreFoundation to contain a function called "kCFIslamicUmmAlQuraCalendar", and it doesn't exist. Ergo, you need to give Office what it's looking for. Unless we're unlucky, the function probably doesn't need to do actually do anything, as long as it exists. Islamic calendar functionality will presumably break, but hopefully that's not a critical feature for you. :)

Take a look at how I fixed Unity games a couple weeks ago. I worked really, really hard to make that writeup detailed but broadly accessible. The basic process here would be the same, just with a different function and library. https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/414689/150839

You need to (1) compile a library which stubs that function, (2) use install_name_tool to make WLMKernel.framework/Versions/A/WLMKernel use your library instead of CoreFoundation, and then (3) use optool to make CoreFoundation a sub-library of your new library. The app should then either start up or crash in a different way, and in the latter case you can adjust the library as necessary.

If you want to try this, I'd be more than happy to help guide you, feel free to ask any questions!
 
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Have you tried changing the system version of the Mac itself?


This was the first trick we leveraged so many years back to make Dropbox continue to work on Leopard.


Just do NOT reboot before changing the system version back!!!!
Pretty please be exceedingly careful about changing SystemVersion.plist. It's really easy to hose your OS because e.g. SoftwareUpdate decides to push something.

It's the worst kind of evil hack because it absolutely can fix stuff which can't be fixed any other way, and so is awfully tempting! But I wouldn't do it outside of a VM if at all possible.
 
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Pretty please be exceedingly careful about changing SystemVersion.plist. It's really easy to hose your OS because e.g. SoftwareUpdate decides to push something.

It's the worst kind of evil hack because it absolutely can fix stuff which can't be fixed any other way... but it's risky. I wouldn't do it outside of a VM if at all possible.
Totally agree. I did this just once in the other thread, but it's not something I'd be doing all the time.
 
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