Office 2008 crashes and fixes; Spaces incompatibility
Normal template, fonts causing Word crashes Word is crashing repeatedly for a number of Office 2008 upgraders, and there appear to be three causes:
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 as described in this tutorial, 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.
MacFixIt reader Philip A. De Simone writes: "It is clear that what is corrupted and thus causing the crashes is the Normal template file. I have installed on two computers successfully after initial Word crashes using the method."
Corrupt Microsoft .plist, etc. files Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete everything that starts with com.microsoft.... Re-attempt application launch and usage.
Corrupt fonts Remove any recently added fonts temporarily, or use a tool like Font Doctor to search for corrupt fonts.
Joe Scozzaro writes:
"I had the same problem (Word, Excel & Powerpoint crashing on startup) with an Office 2004 clean install. I tried a few re-installs and nothing solved the problem. Knowing Microsoft and it's previous issues with fonts, I ran Font Doctor and it found and moved 3 suspect/damaged fonts from my System to a 'Moved Fonts"'folder. I rebooted and everything has worked fine since, well... other than the very occasional greying out and inaccessibility of menu items in the middle of a Word session, requiring a hard quit. Not surprisingly, the 3 'damaged' fonts moved by Font Doctor were installed as part of the Office 2004 installation."
Leopard Spaces incompatibility Office 2008 is incompatible with Spaces in Leopard. Files formatted with .docx (the new standard format for Word documents) cannot be dragged into new spaces, instead snapping back to the original space.
MacFixIt reader Jordan notes some other spaces issues:
"I have been running Word 08 for 2 days now and have determined that it simply will not work with Spaces enabled. If you swap spaces often the document will reappear in the wrong space or worse, not appear at all (this happens most frequently in notebook view). To make matters worse in notebook view occasionally the tabs from another open notebook will simply appear overlaid on top of the front most document which is at worst distracting and certainly annoying. Finally if you try and use expose to hunt down the open windows it does not seem to work either (with spaces enabled). All of this behavior thankfully does go away with spaces disabled, but that certainly should not be a permanent fix."
Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
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Every time I try to quit Word, it wants to send an error message to Microsoft and then reloads Word. Forgetting that quitting without saving should never crash an application, why does it think I want to reload Word when I just quit it?
This is what I hate about Microsoft. All they products assume they know more than we do.
And beside that, their registration refused to take a perfectly valid registration number.
This product is bugware. It shouldn't have been out until at least March.
My problem was that as soon as I quit Word it gave me an error referring to problems saving the normal.dotm and suggesting I check that all my disks were actually connected. I had the same problem when saving certain doc files as docx.
When I looked in the user templates folder it seemed that a normal.dotm file did not exist, so I followed the method of creating a new account and copying the normal.dotm file over. So far it seems to be OK on quit, but some of the files I work with cannot be saved as docx because they are apparently incompatible and contain information not supported by docx. When I continue to save those docs it tells me my hard drive is disconnected etc etc.
Don't run Microsoft software?
With your logic, we shouldn't run Apple software either.
That is unless you think Leopard, iLife and iWork are all flawless in their release versions.
Matlab has problems with this as well, Omnigraffle also.
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iMac, Intel, 17", 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, OS 10.5.1
Suddenly, Mail.app was having issues displaying messages correctly. Characters were piling up on top of each other and everything was garbled. Messages were unreadable. (Turns out, the messages used Arial, one of the fonts that had been replaced by Office.)
Changing the default fonts in Mail.app didn't work. Only moving the fonts out of Fonts Disabled back into the Fonts folder and forcing duplicate fonts in Font Book solved the problem. Truly bizarre.
So, in principle, this new behavior on the part of Office '08 is a significant improvement. In practice, however, it appears to be less than optimal. I should note that I installed the new Office in Tiger, where I continue to do most of my work, as well as in a Leopard test partition. I have not used it much, though, as it was just released at Macworld, where I bought a copy Thursday.
I also was unable to register Office '08 because the Microsoft registration web site would not recognize either my product ID or serial number. Clearly they did not update their site database in preparation for the release of the product. It's just another example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing - a problem, frankly, in all large organizations, not just Microsoft.
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Don't anthropomorphize computers.
They hate that.
- by arodney January 19, 2008 5:54 PM PST
- <class="merchant"><span>></span><div class="datestamp"><i>This is a reply to a previous comment by WhiteDog</i></div></class><br />
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(9 Comments)The only issue I've had so far with Office 2008 was in Entourage where none of the notification sounds would work. Going into Preferences, clicking Notification and clicking on each sound did nothing. I deleted com.microsoft.Entourage.prefs.plist and relaunched Entourage, now its working fine.
Seems the trick may be, go into the User Library, Preferences and search for all com.microsoft doc's there and trash them (or any that are older than those produced after a first launch of the new product). IOW, even though Entourage was run several times, that old com.microsoft.Entourage.prefs.plist was still floating around with an old modification date. Trashing that at least fixed my sound issues, maybe others I had yet to find.