crashes in office (excel and word for example) on macbook pro

[zaphon]

I have a Macbook Pro that I have had for about 4 months now. I have
office installed on it (and have applied all updates including 11.3).
Office works fine, but is EXTREMELY finicky. For example, I have found
I can't right click on anything without risk of crashing. I have two
reproducable crashes.

With Excel

1. Open a new workbook
2. Enter something into the first cell (say the number 5), hit enter,
and than click back into the cell.
3. Now right click to open the context menu and boom crash.

With Word

1. Open a blank document.
2. Type a word or two (say new car)
3. Highlight 1 or more words
4. Right click on word to open context menu and boom crash.

Note

These context menus work until you actually enter something into the
program (you can right click in both examples before you type anything
in, but once you try and do it on text you have entered, it crashes).

Is anyone else experiencing anything like this, or is it just a whacked
out installation I have?

Thanks

 

[CyberTaz]

Was the Office 2004 Test Drive on the MBP when you bought it? If so, did you
use the Remove Office Utility app to remove it *completely* rather than just
dragging the Test Drive folder to the Trash? Have you run Disk Utility -
Repair Disk Permissions since installing Office?... each Update?

What about OS X - Are you at 10.4.8? If you've recently applied 10.4.8 using
Software Update you might try d/l the Combo for IntelMacs from the Apple
site. Reinstall, repair permissions, restart & see if that clears it up.

I know the Intel Macs have been coughing & sneezing in a number of ways with
a variety of apps running through Rosetta.

 

[zaphon]

I have no real idea if the test drive was on the mac when I bought it
(that was in June). I know it's not in my /Applications directory now,
and I don't recall removing it. But it's possible. If I did remove
it, no I didn't use the Remove Office Utility App to remove it (I own a
mac, not a PC, you uninstall apps by dragging them to the trash can (at
least that's how it's SUPPOSED to work *shrug*)).

I have had this problem since I installed Office on this mac back in
June, just figured that a patch would come along (I only use office for
like 5-10 minutes per week max) and fix it. I have run a repair disk
permissions (just ran another 5 minutes ago).

I have upgraded to 10.4.8, but as I said above, this problem has been
occuring since June, it's not something new. Just something I'm
getting tired of and came here wondering if I'm the only person
experiencing it. I will attempt to remove and re-install office
tonight and see if that helps any (which is a pain in the first place,
my macbook pro absolutely refuses to read my office CD's (their the
only CD's that it won't read), it's really odd).

 

[CyberTaz]

Sorry, but reinstalling will most likely not change anything - remember, you
"own a mac, not a PC"

Please take a look here before you do anything else:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/TroubleshootingIndex.html

I hadn't referred you originally because I was trying to narrow down the
issue.

BTW - You're right about the removal technique for many *applications*, but
Office is a *suite* of applications integrated with one another. They share
common resources as well as interacting with the OS is a variety of
different ways. Because of the complexity of the software (not just Office)
there are numerous additional files installed above & beyond what is in the
application folder. If they are not removed it can cause conflicts that
range anywhere 'nuisance' to 'catastrophic' in scope.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Zaphon:

I have no real idea if the test drive was on the mac when I bought it
(that was in June). I know it's not in my /Applications directory now,
and I don't recall removing it. But it's possible. If I did remove
it, no I didn't use the Remove Office Utility App to remove it (I own a
mac, not a PC, you uninstall apps by dragging them to the trash can (at
least that's how it's SUPPOSED to work *shrug*)).

I'm not wanting to argue with you, my aim with this post is to add
information that everyone (including yourself...) can use

Under OLD Mac (OS 9 and prior) this was certainly true: you uninstalled Apps
by dragging them to the trash.

Under NEW Mac (Unix) this is no longer true -- or safe! It's not helpful to
perpetuate this myth, because it can result in some very sick Macs.

Modern Mac applications store all manner of settings and data in preference
files. In Windows, it's all in a giant two-part file named the Registry, in
Mac, it's lots of little XML files that tend to be scattered in lots of
locations around the system.

If you run the Uninstaller (Remove Office, in this case...) it tracks down
all of these hidden files and settings all over the system in each of the
affected user accounts, and does a clean removal.

If you drag the thing to the trash, all the settings files remain, making an
untidy and disk-space-wasteful mess all over the system and providing rich
pickings for the trojan data miners beginning to appear for Mac OS X.

Normally, the user will never notice. With the "Application" gone, its
stranded parameter lists and preference files are never accessed or used,
they simply waste disk space.

The rot sets in when you re-install another copy of the same application.
It then has preferences and settings pointing to places that no longer
exist, and you have now seen the result.

Obviously, the proper cure to this would be to code each application so that
it removes or rewrites all resources that it is interested in when it
installs or first runs.

Even better would be if the Office installation were to assume the presence
of the Test Drive version, and remove it and correctly update all the prefs
automatically.

So it's quite clear that Microsoft has done a very bad thing here, we just
need to ensure that we kick them in the correct part of their badness. I am
aiming here to create a level of pain sufficient to persuade Microsoft never
to do this again

Now: Let me see if I can add some helpful comments. I'll do that in a new
post...

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Again, Zaphon:

OK, it's "Yes" to both. You do have a whacked-out installation, and other
people *are* experiencing similar misery.

As Bob points out, these problems can be maddeningly-difficult to fix
because of the massively complex interactions between the Office suite of
software and the rest of the software on the computer.

I don't know a lot about Excel, I'm a Word person. However, there is a lot
of common code between both applications.

One of the problems we're fighting here is that Apple OS X has gone through
multiple revisions since Office 2004 was designed. Each revision takes OS X
further away from the platform Word expected to be sitting on, and each one
thus potentially makes the problems worse.

Office 2004 was designed for OS 10.2.8 and upgraded for 10.3. I have it
running on 10.3.9 and its very solid. Because I depend for a living on
Word, I won't go higher on the operating system with this current version of
Office, and now you've found out why. Of course, a back-grade is not an
option for you. But I ask you to accept that no matter how hard we try,
we'll never get Office 2004 perfectly stable on OS 10.4.8 (and certainly not
on 10.5....)

You, like I, are waiting for the next version of Office.

Now: What to do...

Crashing on right-clicks are OFTEN caused by bad fonts or haxies. The first
thing I would do is thoroughly audit your font system to ensure it is in
perfect health. If you have any font managers in play, turn them off.
Install only your working set of fonts, and make sure each one is
uncorrupted. Badness is common if fonts are being enabled or disabled
on-the-fly when you switch from application to application.

The right-click causes a context switch from and back to the application in
focus. If this results in a font the application was intending to use to
draw the context menu being disabled then re-enabled by the font manager,
bang she indeed will go!

The other thing that often causes entertainment on the right-click is
various add-ins that offer to "help" in various ways: Cite While you Write,
WindowShades, Spelling utilities. To debug this, disable anything that
wasn't made by Apple or Microsoft, then re-enable them one by one.

Right-click badness in Word can be caused by
spelling/grammar/bullets/numbering badness. A lot of that can be cured by
re-naming the Normal template. It hols or defines a lot of the settings
used by these features.

Rebuilding the font caches (as described amongst the material Bob sent you
to...) is always worth a try in OS 10.4 systems. OS X uses an incredible
number of caches, and its handling of font caches has caused lots of
problems for people.

Finally, the website Bob refer erred you to gives a procedure for a Remove
and Reinstall. If you follow that exactly you get a "scorched earth"
cleansing of your Office installation that cures just about everything
(provided the problem is not a bad font, or a conflicting haxie).

Hope this helps

I have had this problem since I installed Office on this mac back in
June, just figured that a patch would come along (I only use office for
like 5-10 minutes per week max) and fix it. I have run a repair disk
permissions (just ran another 5 minutes ago).

I have upgraded to 10.4.8, but as I said above, this problem has been
occuring since June, it's not something new. Just something I'm
getting tired of and came here wondering if I'm the only person
experiencing it. I will attempt to remove and re-install office
tonight and see if that helps any (which is a pain in the first place,
my macbook pro absolutely refuses to read my office CD's (their the
only CD's that it won't read), it's really odd).

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[zaphon]

I'm pretty convinced that Office just hates me now. As it was the
weekend, I took some extreme measures. I backed up everything of mine,
and I did a clean install of my macbook pro. Just Mac OS X (none of
the trial stuff, etc.). I than applied all the OS updates and did a
clean install of Office 2004. I than went through the updates of it to
11.3 and tested again. Low and behold, it still has the problem. I am
floored, as I was sure it was something else (as I just don't see how
the menus work as long as I don't have anything highlighted, it's just
when I highlight some text and try to pop a context menu does it
crash). So who knows. I do know that it works fine on my old iBook
(which is also running 10.4.8 btw), so I'd blame it on some weird
Rosetta bug.

Just wanted to drop a follow up. I have re-installed all my apps,
restored my files, and am still struggling along with Word/Excel as I
was before. Hopefully some day a new version of office will come along
(dual booting or parallels just seem to both defeat the purpose of
having a Mac)

 

[CyberTaz]

Not that I'm trying to shift the blame here, but I just returned from the
MBP Discussions on the Apple site & it appears to me that chronic crashes
are epidemic for a wide variety of reasons.

Having gone through a clean install of OS X & Office with no change in
behavior it might be time to consider the possibility that the problem may
be with the hardware - possibly even bad RAM. Assuming you did a proper job
(including permission repair along the way) any software issues should have
been resolved as you expected. You might be smart to have the unit checked
out while it is still under warranty.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[zaphon]

I appreciate your concern. If I didn't sit in front of my mac no less
than 10 hours a day (most days closer to 12) I might think that maybe
there is something else wrong with it. But I'll be honest, currently
out of the 20+ applications (Apple Mail, Firefox, Adium, Terminal,
Apache, PHP, Perl, World of Warcraft, etc.) I use on my mac daily,
Office is the ONLY one crashing. It's also the only one that's not a
universal binary and not running native. Hence why I think it's a bug
with Rosetta. The Macbook Pro is only 4 months old, I'll keep my
fingers crossed, and as soon as I start encountering other problems
with other programs I'll be heading to apple. For now it works
flawlessly except for Office, so I'll take my chances.

Thanks for all the help and advice.

 

[CyberTaz]

Sorry I don't have more to offer but you may very well be right about
Rosetta. I hope that's all it is. I also fully understand where you're
coming from. The weird thing is that any number of others are using similar
configs (if not identical) without any such glitches. I can't help believing
that there is [simply?] a missing piece to the puzzle.

The final point I would offer though is that the waters are not always as
calm as they appear to be on the surface. I thought my G5 was humming along
like a finely tuned dragster - until it just plain crashed so hard I
couldn't even recover a file, let alone start up. I still run Disk Utility -
Verify Disk once a month as well as a few other diagnostic utilities.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

I appreciate your concern. If I didn't sit in front of my mac no less
than 10 hours a day (most days closer to 12) I might think that maybe
there is something else wrong with it. But I'll be honest, currently
out of the 20+ applications (Apple Mail, Firefox, Adium, Terminal,
Apache, PHP, Perl, World of Warcraft, etc.) I use on my mac daily,
Office is the ONLY one crashing. It's also the only one that's not a
universal binary and not running native. Hence why I think it's a bug
with Rosetta. The Macbook Pro is only 4 months old, I'll keep my
fingers crossed, and as soon as I start encountering other problems
with other programs I'll be heading to apple. For now it works
flawlessly except for Office, so I'll take my chances.

Thanks for all the help and advice.

Not that I'm trying to shift the blame here, but I just returned from the
MBP Discussions on the Apple site & it appears to me that chronic crashes
are epidemic for a wide variety of reasons.

Having gone through a clean install of OS X & Office with no change in
behavior it might be time to consider the possibility that the problem may
be with the hardware - possibly even bad RAM. Assuming you did a proper job
(including permission repair along the way) any software issues should have
been resolved as you expected. You might be smart to have the unit checked
out while it is still under warranty.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

I'm pretty convinced that Office just hates me now. As it was the
weekend, I took some extreme measures. I backed up everything of mine,
and I did a clean install of my macbook pro. Just Mac OS X (none of
the trial stuff, etc.). I than applied all the OS updates and did a
clean install of Office 2004. I than went through the updates of it to
11.3 and tested again. Low and behold, it still has the problem. I am
floored, as I was sure it was something else (as I just don't see how
the menus work as long as I don't have anything highlighted, it's just
when I highlight some text and try to pop a context menu does it
crash). So who knows. I do know that it works fine on my old iBook
(which is also running 10.4.8 btw), so I'd blame it on some weird
Rosetta bug.

Just wanted to drop a follow up. I have re-installed all my apps,
restored my files, and am still struggling along with Word/Excel as I
was before. Hopefully some day a new version of office will come along
(dual booting or parallels just seem to both defeat the purpose of
having a Mac)

John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
Hi Again, Zaphon:

OK, it's "Yes" to both. You do have a whacked-out installation, and other
people *are* experiencing similar misery.

As Bob points out, these problems can be maddeningly-difficult to fix
because of the massively complex interactions between the Office suite of
software and the rest of the software on the computer.

I don't know a lot about Excel, I'm a Word person. However, there is a lot
of common code between both applications.

One of the problems we're fighting here is that Apple OS X has gone through
multiple revisions since Office 2004 was designed. Each revision takes OS
X
further away from the platform Word expected to be sitting on, and each one
thus potentially makes the problems worse.

Office 2004 was designed for OS 10.2.8 and upgraded for 10.3. I have it
running on 10.3.9 and its very solid. Because I depend for a living on
Word, I won't go higher on the operating system with this current version
of
Office, and now you've found out why. Of course, a back-grade is not an
option for you. But I ask you to accept that no matter how hard we try,
we'll never get Office 2004 perfectly stable on OS 10.4.8 (and certainly
not
on 10.5....)

You, like I, are waiting for the next version of Office.

Now: What to do...

Crashing on right-clicks are OFTEN caused by bad fonts or haxies. The
first
thing I would do is thoroughly audit your font system to ensure it is in
perfect health. If you have any font managers in play, turn them off.
Install only your working set of fonts, and make sure each one is
uncorrupted. Badness is common if fonts are being enabled or disabled
on-the-fly when you switch from application to application.

The right-click causes a context switch from and back to the application in
focus. If this results in a font the application was intending to use to
draw the context menu being disabled then re-enabled by the font manager,
bang she indeed will go!

The other thing that often causes entertainment on the right-click is
various add-ins that offer to "help" in various ways: Cite While you Write,
WindowShades, Spelling utilities. To debug this, disable anything that
wasn't made by Apple or Microsoft, then re-enable them one by one.

Right-click badness in Word can be caused by
spelling/grammar/bullets/numbering badness. A lot of that can be cured by
re-naming the Normal template. It hols or defines a lot of the settings
used by these features.

Rebuilding the font caches (as described amongst the material Bob sent you
to...) is always worth a try in OS 10.4 systems. OS X uses an incredible
number of caches, and its handling of font caches has caused lots of
problems for people.

Finally, the website Bob refer erred you to gives a procedure for a Remove
and Reinstall. If you follow that exactly you get a "scorched earth"
cleansing of your Office installation that cures just about everything
(provided the problem is not a bad font, or a conflicting haxie).

Hope this helps

On 28/10/06 7:26 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "(e-mail address removed)"

I have had this problem since I installed Office on this mac back in
June, just figured that a patch would come along (I only use office for
like 5-10 minutes per week max) and fix it. I have run a repair disk
permissions (just ran another 5 minutes ago).

I have upgraded to 10.4.8, but as I said above, this problem has been
occuring since June, it's not something new. Just something I'm
getting tired of and came here wondering if I'm the only person
experiencing it. I will attempt to remove and re-install office
tonight and see if that helps any (which is a pain in the first place,
my macbook pro absolutely refuses to read my office CD's (their the
only CD's that it won't read), it's really odd).

On Oct 27, 2:15 pm, "CyberTaz" <typegeneraltaz1ATcomcastdotnet> wrote:
Was the Office 2004 Test Drive on the MBP when you bought it? If so, did
you
use the Remove Office Utility app to remove it *completely* rather than
just
dragging the Test Drive folder to the Trash? Have you run Disk Utility -
Repair Disk Permissions since installing Office?... each Update?

What about OS X - Are you at 10.4.8? If you've recently applied 10.4.8
using
Software Update you might try d/l the Combo for IntelMacs from the Apple
site. Reinstall, repair permissions, restart & see if that clears it up.

I know the Intel Macs have been coughing & sneezing in a number of ways
with
a variety of apps running through Rosetta.
--
Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

message
I have a Macbook Pro that I have had for about 4 months now. I have
office installed on it (and have applied all updates including 11.3).
Office works fine, but is EXTREMELY finicky. For example, I have found
I can't right click on anything without risk of crashing. I have two
reproducable crashes.

With Excel

1. Open a new workbook
2. Enter something into the first cell (say the number 5), hit enter,
and than click back into the cell.
3. Now right click to open the context menu and boom crash.

With Word

1. Open a blank document.
2. Type a word or two (say new car)
3. Highlight 1 or more words
4. Right click on word to open context menu and boom crash.

Note

These context menus work until you actually enter something into the
program (you can right click in both examples before you type anything
in, but once you try and do it on text you have entered, it crashes).

Is anyone else experiencing anything like this, or is it just a whacked
out installation I have?

Thanks


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410