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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.
ego, much?
Don't forget about running Windows 95 on DRDos (if OS = DRDOS, randomly throw warning/error) or Office95 on OS/2 (ask for memory at 2GB boundary, OS/2 only had 512MB windows VM). Those are 2 of the notable instances where MS purposefully made their own software flaky or broken for no reason other than to kill the competitor. I'm sure there are others.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
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.
You blame Microsoft?
Maybe you'll have a lot of blaming to do about things that work everywhere but not on this Apple masterpiece.
lucm, indeed.
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
The job ain't done 'til Lotus don't run!
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.
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.
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.
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
... 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).
Windows95 included its very own DOS. You're confusing the shitty Windows 95 with the godawful Windows 3.1.
And by everywhere you mean "on computers running Microsoft Windows."
ok, 'almost' everywhere.
it's surprises me that apple, the pinnacle of supercool software (tm), lacks it's own office productivity toolset and needs to resort to ms office, it doesn't surprise me that much that it doesn't work but what's quite hilarious is that the proposed (in this tread) alternative is libreoffice. as roy zimmerman put it: 'sometimes satire writes itself'.
my prayers and best wishes for those poor mistreated mac users
Never dealt with Microsoft when I was at Apple. Your guess is as good as mine as to how they botched it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You blame Microsoft?
They are rather notorious for not following the developer guidelines and painting themselves into corners.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Except it doesn't work well on Windows either
Written by someone about ot re-image his surface pro 3 to 8.1 and office 2013 because OneNote and Excel just worked before the downgrade to 2016. Really MS does make much better software than 15 years ago Linux users reading this. Windows 7/0ffice 2010 were it's height.
I guess it comes to show what happens when you have no QA team left and rely on agile software development and user feed back for bugs. Until a user submits a story via a frown no one knows about the bug
Well back to the old WindowsME days of skipping a release and waiting until service pack 1 before updating. Windows 10 too in my opinion just entered beta last August. I will switch to Office 2016 and WIndows 10 next year when update 1 of both come out.
It is incompetence and not malicious if their freaking own OS and products like the surface can't run VBA macros and onenote properly
http://saveie6.com/
lacks it's own office productivity toolset
Nope. They have a superior set of productivity apps, which they just don't market very well.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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. :)
And, worst, the kind of update that SHOULD NOT had broken them.
Why *IN HELL* restricting system files would broek a Productivity Application?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I used the latest Outlook while it was in beta earlier this year - and to be quite honest.... I preferred it over the Windows Outlook. I find the Windows Outlook to be just insane with the number of buttons, and the placement of them is not always logical. I have no idea why they put the send button to the left of the to/cc addresses, other than they might have had a spot there.... most western eyes naturally flow left to right, top to bottom, then back to the top..... so the send button is the last place you would look for it when your flow has already taken you away from that location (first fill in to/cc/subject then body). There has got to be 30 buttons scattered around the mail all over the place - just full of clutter. After the beta, I decided not to buy (I have 2008 around somewhere - but don't use it anymore - I tend to use Pages/Numbers for personal, and LibreOffice for reading work documents since they are in that format).
Now the built in email client in OS X seems to work fine with the Exchange Server (webmail since I work at home) [a year ago it use to get stuck and not update after a while] -- which makes me happy since I really only want a simple email client. Most Outlook users that I have worked with only tend to use it for email as well -- nothing that the internal OS X email client won't handle.
Office 2016 requires Yosemite, it will not install on 10.9 or earlier.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I'm not sure about that. I have Keynote and PowerPoint installed (and OpenOffice and LibreOffice). For lectures, I still prefer Beamer (including syntax highlighted code snippets in anything else is painful), but Keynote has nothing like the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint, which makes drawing figures a lot easier. It also doesn't have as useful guides and makes it harder to produce useful templates. These days, I generally use PowerPoint for short presentations (though for some things I find the results of Sozi much more effective than anything else for a lot of things. It's still very new and unpolished though).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Windows ME? Why? You had 98SE and 2000 to choose from, and either one would be better than the hybrid abortion that was ME.
Outlook is a piece of crap on Windows too so that shouldn't be a surprise. In fact I'm wondering how they figured out it was acting differently with El Capitan...was it just locking up/hanging for longer than usual?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why do you people work such shitty jobs for megacorps? Makes sense if you're in a startup where you might hit the jackpot, but Microsoft?
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.
Yes, the issue was Win 3.1 with DR-DOS (eventually they had a compatibility mode) but you could run Windows 95 on DR-DOS. Windows 95-ME was still DOS + a shell. You could replace the MS-DOS with DR-DOS.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Well the "correct" course of action was to stay on Windows 98SE, wait for XP SP1. If you didn't mind being on Win 9x.
The equivalent would be stay on XP, wait for 7 SP1 (Vista SP2 an option too) ; stay on Windows 7, wait for Windows "10.1" (or Windows 8.1.1)
My Send button is [CTRL]+[ENTER], whose location has remained constant since 1997, if not earlier.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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...
what Microsoft did to stop Lotus
This is actually urban legend. Never happened. Pure myth. Remember, Microsoft was, in the DOS days, utterly dependent on Lotus to sell PCs. Every Lotus employee involved at the time also deny there ever was such a problem.
Lotus 1-2-3 dies because Excel was a (in areas vastly) superior product. It certainly had its flaws, but from a usability standpoint it blew Lotus out of the water. You only have to look at the Apple side of things. Lotus Symphony and Excel existed at the same time on the Mac, and I would guesstimate that Excel outsold Lotus on Apple by about a million to one.
and WordPerfect
This isn't even an urban legend. This never happened, and there isn't even a myth that it did.
Word Perfect committed suicide. Word Perfect on Windows was a deeply flawed product. It was, for any windows user, a usability nightmare. The morons insisted on staying with WP shortcuts and their own (horrible) menu system despite the fact that nobody wanted it. Refusing to change, and at the release of Microsoft Word 2.0, which was a far inferior product from a technical standpoint, but good enough for 97.5% of all use-cases, WordPerfect was dead. By moronic suicide. WP refused to go the proper Windows route, their product (on Windows) was buggy as to be unusable until version 6.0a and by then the fight was over.
Myth
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.
I remember Windows 2000 was good enough and stable for daily use, if you are not into pc gaming. Win98SE still gives you lots of blue screen and reboot often.
In fact, one of the anti-monopoly cases was decided in favor of DRDOS finally decades after the injury that MS not only illegally bundles DOS with Win95, but purposefully sabotaged other DOSes if they found Win95 running on top of them. Little good it did DRDOS or IBM PC DOS, both which were arguably better than MS DOS.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.