Problems with PowerPoint 2011

I like keynote better than open office / libre office and I like libre office better than powerpoint. I would install the freeware open office or libre office as an immediate workaround. Later, when you have time, try getting support from Microsoft on a complete uninstall of Office 2011 and reinstall.

I do know that when I installed Office 2011 on my wife's machine, it wiped out a bunch of fonts needed by open office and I was able to solve the problem by simply reinstalling open office. If I ran into a situation where I had to reinstall Office 2011, I'd be worried that it would louse something else up on her machine. Thankfully I have Time Machine and Crashplan in place. The reason we have Office 2011 is so my wife can view attachments sent my MS users at my daughter's school. They don't always look right in either OOO or iWork. If it wasn't for that, we would never have bothered. We got Office 2011 through the $10 home use program and I'm still not sure it was worth it. I've been an Office user since 97 but every version since 2003 had brought more bloat, less performance and only a trickle of new features to justify the staggering 2 gigabytes of code growth.

 

Did you use Microsoft's procedure for removing Office?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2398768

If not, perhaps you might give that a shot , then try to reinstall.

 

Office 2011 install removed some duplicate fonts but not all. I suspect OpenOffice did not need to be re-installed but deleting font cache would have fixed the issues.

Font Nuke and Onyx are two that are easy to use.

To see exactly what happens to fonts when installing Microsoft Office see

Font Management

Another good resource on using fonts is Kurt Lang's site:

Font Management in OS X by Kurt Lang

FWIW, Font Book will identify duplicate fonts, but does not tell you which is the newer font to delete.

I've also found that disabling a font is not always the best option. Often the disabled font will be re-enabled. Move the font physically to another location other than Fonts Disabled folder or just delete the font.