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Office 2016 Proving Unstable With Apple's El Capitan
An anonymous reader writes: Users of Microsoft Office on the Mac are reporting widespread instabilities and conflicts after upgrading to the latest version of the Apple desktop operating system, El Capitan. The first indications that El Capitan and Office 2016 were not working well together came in a now epic thread at Microsoft Community. Many users have surmised that new restrictions in file permissions in El Capitan caused the problems initially, though nearly all agree that Office's Outlook email client is the critical point of failure in the current round of application crashes and loss of functionality.
Remembering what Microsoft did to stop Lotus and WordPerfect from running on their platforms, it seems kind of fitting that they should be getting shafted by an Apple update now. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Outlook/Entourage on the Mac has always been a piece of crap.
You are far better off running the Windows version in a VM or within a Wine wrapper .
For light/average users, stick to Apple Mail/Calander/Contacts.
El Capitan can't run MS Office 2016.
But since Microsoft is more responsive to customer feedback than Apple, they will probably implement a workaround.
ego, much?
It's not just El Capitan. Per the linked thread, Yosemite has the same issues.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Maybe it wasn't so smart laying off all your QA people, eh Microsoft?
It's bad enough I have Yosemite. This steaming pile of shit basically ruined my laptop.
I got a notice from Native Instruments warning against upgrading to El Capitan, as a number of their products don't work with it either. Apparently something about the sound driver model was changed. The result of trying isn't just failure, but complete kernel panics.
Is the typical OS X upgrade this perilous? I don't recall hearing warnings like this before.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Just upgraded to El Capitan last night.
Problem (1): I found out very quickly that root has been neutered; you can't make any changes to "system" files (in this case, meaning files that were included in the OS distribution, including things like the Mail.app folder or binaries, etc.). You get a message about not having permission, despite being root, and without any extended attributes being set on the files. Turns out that El Capitan uses a new "rootless" model in which root is no longer root and many parts of the system are off limits to any human user. Solution: Boot into recovery mode, start a terminal, and enter the command "csrutil disable" then reboot. You'll get root back and will be able to change files again.
Problem (2): Parts of Office 2011 didn't work at all—just beach balled upon startup. I tried to figure this out for a while but didn't see anyone else talking about solutions online, so I installed Office Mac 2016 (since I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway so that I can use it on my tablet and phone). I've been using the Office Mac 2016 applications all day (Outlook, Word, and Excel for work) heavily, without any trouble, so as a data sample of one I can say that in my case, 2016 is definitely a better bet on El Capitan than 2011, since Word and Outlook 2011 didn't work at all.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why are you trying to modify Mail.app or other system files? Files in etc are modifiable - including hosts, fstab etc.
Not having any problems. I like the new layout and appearance much better than 2011. Email is going out without a problem.
You shank my Jengaship!
Because I keep my Applications folder lean and uncluttered and I never use Mail.app, as one example, so I want it gone from sight.
My prerogative as the ower of the system, I'd say.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
HOSTS!
hosts is modifiable - it is in /etc. I have already modified files there....
Just tried my Office 2011 install under El Cap, having slightly panicked at your post, and have had no problems at all, thank goodness.
The later versions however may have problems. We were told by IT at work that they were going to roll out Office 2016 and that we needed to upgrade to Yosemite or it wouldn't work.
Enterprise people tend to always want the latest Office despite it never having any new features that anyone needs.
You're holding it wrong. In the new iOS X model you're supposed to press the Home button and navigate the springboard, not look in /Applications.
What do you mean "your Mac?" It's clearly Steve Jobs (c/o Tim Cook)'s Mac.
Man I wish I were joking.
The real problem is Faisal Jeelani
I've had so much trouble with Apple updates in the last couple years. I ended up stopping doing upgrades, completely. I'm still on Mavericks and iOS 7 and will remain here until these machines fall to pieces, at which point I'm just going to order something cheap on Alibaba and stick Linux on it. The whole point of buying these overpriced products is that they're supposed to "Just work." They just don't live up to the promise, anymore. Apple is looking more like Microsoft each day.
Honestly Office on OSX has ALWAYS been a steaming pile of crap. It's one of those MS apps that remind us why Microsoft hates anyone not on windows.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apple is so full of themselves they don't care who or what they break. Hell. They ARE APPLE! The gods of rotten cores. LOL
Calling jcr! Calling jcr!
John, you had some involvement with Apple and OS X, did you not?
Can you give us your input regarding this matter?
Wait? This is not informative... it's bad advice. Informative would be a solution to work along side the new security features. You know.. that etc folder thingy bopper.
Wait - it's 2015 - and people are still using Outlook as their mail client? On a Mac, no less?
We too were advised not to upgrade to El Capitan due to MS Office having issues with that release. Instead, we will be upgrading to El Capitan *and* upgrading MS Office to Office 356 which apparently does not have this issue.
The first thing I wanted after installing El Capitan was information on how to disable rootless mode, not advice about the soundness of this idea. Thankfully, I found an informative post or two by searching Google. Any advice would not have been the information I was looking for.
And for those that are interested, yes, there is actually a .conf file that controls the rootless mode protections. I forget the path, but if you Google, you'll find it. The catch of course is that you have to disable rootless mode in order to edit it, and each time you want to edit it, which means multiple reboots for each edit.
Given the fact that I use software from across the 'net on my Mac, much of it not Apple developer signed and some of it development oriented, I figured I'd likely encounter problems along the way by trying to edit the .conf file and would have to keep banging on and editing it over time. And I've been using Macs and Mac OS for years already without rootless mode, so I don't feel too catastrophically ba about not having it now.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Title IX.
Even a 76-year old employee of Apple is still entitled to protections under Title IX.
DOJ
... when old stuff still work fine and more stable. Sure, unsupported. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I held off on updating to Yosemite because I wasn't too impressed with Mavericks over Mountain Lion and Mavericks was slower.
I updated recently and Yosemite is way faster than Mavericks.
The stability and speed of Yosemite give me faith in Apple again, which I had largely lost because of Mavericks was slow compared to Mountain Lion (which I can't and won't tolerate, Windows 7 is never slow.)
I don't know if the first couple of iterations of Yosemite were as nice as the current one, but Yosemite is a very pleasant surprise over Mavericks.
--- Late Yosemite adopter, wish I had upgraded earlier but Mavericks made me expect updates to be worse (like Windows largely does these days).
Office 2016 requires Yosemite, it will not install on 10.9 or earlier.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Is my office going to be unstable in 2016?
Or is it only Microsoft's office?
The title is misleading.
So why is it this stuff never gets vetted in beta testing? I actually think El Capitan is horrible, it looks washed out, the thing looks atrocious and Safari seems to run ragged and hangs with plugin's of any kind installed. As far as Office goes, not sure who to blame. Microsoft or Apple or possibly both have some blame here.
Just incompetence to push out stuff that breaks stuff this bad. I can see some bugs being found but lately both Apple and Microsoft have been really bad in releasing buggy upgrades to their operating systems. Makes me just want to go back to Mavericks, IOS 8 and Windows 7. At least they all were stable and I liked working with all of them.
Nearly every upgrade before El Capitan used to result in something getting messed up on my Macs. This time it was very smooth, and with the exception of one minor upgrade to Little Snitch v3.6, there was absolutely no problem with the video and image editing software I used day in and out. Photoshop, Capture One, Avid media composer, iMovie, Office 2011, VMWare, OpenVPN and a whole bunch of other software I use just work fine. That said, El Cap has still not solved the horrible bluetooth audio stutter issue that's plagued all our macs and bluetooth speakers or headphones for years now.
I am still using an old Mac Book Pro with Core i7 quad core processor. I use VMware Fusion running a virtual machine with MS Window 7. It runs MS Office 365 / 2016 without a problem. I would run Office 2016 natively on the Mac but the Mac version does not include MS Access. Jeff
First off was the failure to boot from cold after the upgrade with a kernel panic. After some searching around, I found some discussion about kext (from SyncMate) that upset El Capitan .. after manually hacking those out from the recovery mode, the machine was back again. It wasn't until today, that I found I couldn't use airplay to display video on the TV using my jailbroken AppleTV 2. Apparently El Capitan insists on a new encryption which is only available when Apple TV is running the latest version of iOS.
Not happy.
LibreOffice Fresh
Uhm, Outlook is the "one" program I have on my computer that is sometimes buggy, and this is a hackintosh no less.
cause in the old days, people would just tell you how great apple is
at least now we have an element of realism: apple sucks just like everyone else
a few years from now...people will recall those horrid power connector plugs, and say, typical apple crappo hardware...
Apple gave fair warning to vendors that they wanted sandboxed applications to be the standard for the platform. Sandboxed applications do not run out of system directories, they are basically "jailed" in their own sandboxes. Microsoft, like most software vendors, ignored Apple. So now the vendors are reaping the rewards of what they sowed.
The bigger problem with El Capitan lies with virtualization and VPN software. These need to make changes to the system routing and interface tables to properly route packets between virtual machines and the Internet, or between the local host and the other end of a VPN tunnel. El Capitan breaks our VPN at work and I have advised our employees to not upgrade to El Capitan due to this fact until Apple and VPN vendors come up with a solution to this problem. I certainly am not going to advise employees on how to disable Apple's security system (SIP), that would be lunacy on my part akin to telling employees how to disable virus protection on their Windows laptops given the increasing threat level for Macs recently.
In the end, we need more secure systems, and Apple is providing one. The fact that it breaks existing applications and inconveniences users is unsurprising. It would have been surprising if that *hadn't* happened -- which is one reason why consumer operating systems are so insecure (because making them secure breaks so much stuff).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I use Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client (Version 3.1.06073 - Copyright 2004 - 2014) and it works with El Capitan..... Based on the copyright not being updated, I don't think this is the latest version either..... and it works fine.... so El Capitan does not "break" all VPN clients....
Downloaded El Capitan last night, haven't pushed the button yet. Manage to use my Macbook Pro in place of the shitty Dell laptop corporate IT pushes on me. This makes Outlook fairly mandatory, but I can use RDP to a Windows machine to resolve it. Better I know now.
Surprisingly, I've been a fan of MS Office, and have been tickled that Microsoft has offered such great support on the Mac platform. I feel they've (finally) adopted the, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" crowd. This is great, and I use MS product on my Macs and pay for valid licenses on Windows VMs for when it's needed (Required Windows to write a book (shameless plug here: https://www.packtpub.com/netwo...). Please, Microsoft, keep up the cross-OS/platform support.
You mean they're supposed to be flawless, because Apple, because reasons. Five people out of five million purchases report a problem with an Apple product, and Tim Cook better be calling Kerry Washington because they've got a scaaandal on their hands.
Think that's hyperbole? At the height of Bendghazi, Apple had reports from a total of 6 users on their iPhone screens bending. Whereas the Samsung Galaxy cracked, rather than bended, at the same pressure but there was no whining at Samsung.
Then, of course, there's don't hold it wrong.
Nah, not joking. Trolling.
boot into recovery, open terminal, csrutil disable, reboot