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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.
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.
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
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!
The job ain't done 'til Lotus don't run!
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
My Send button is [CTRL]+[ENTER], whose location has remained constant since 1997, if not earlier.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.