Microsoft Office 2011 - Word crashes after latest update

[endor-moon]

Just updated to Yosemite and the latest Office update, Office2011-1446Update_EN-US.dmg. After the update, Word crashes constantly. Anyone else seeing this behaviour? I'm not sure if this is only on Yosemite. At the time of the crash, I was logged on as an Active Directory non-privileged user.

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
App: Microsoft Word
Version: 14.4.6.141106
Crashed Module Name: CoreFoundation
Crashed Module Version: 1151.16
Crashed Module Offset: 0x0000779b
Blame Module Name: MicrosoftMenuLibrary
Blame Module Version: 14.4.6.141106

...and so on.

Cheers...

[emily]

Had the same problem with a user here and Excel. We wiped all of the preference files and that seemed to help. I also recommended she open files from within Excel, rather than double-clicking on a file to launch Excel and read the file. That also helped.

[tkimpton]

That latest update has could outlook to freeze on some of our machines and we have to rebuild the machine without the update.

[endor-moon]

I think the crash has something to do with my pathetic attempts to propagate the Office font cache and registration name through the default User Template... I know this is no longer considered a "best practice" but I don't like the idea of each of our students having to wait for the Office to build its font cache and then getting to enter something rude for the first name last, last name and company name...

Is there a better way to do this?

[Kumarasinghe]

We are also experiencing issues with Office 2011 and OS X 10.10.1
Tested with Office 2011 with 14.4.6 update and Office 2011 with SP3 (14.3.0). Office apps crashing upon launching on both instances.

Hopefully Microsoft will release a patch soon.

Mentioning @DavidPelton from Microsoft Team for urgent attention!!!

[frank]

Same here, going back to 14.4.5 as 14.4.6 in Yosemite 10.10.1 seems to crash at random times on random Mac's i've tested with. Some installs it works fine on while others always crash. Hopefully 14.4.5 is stable or else this is a 10.10.1 related issue.

[frank]

Hi everyone,

Just an update on this, i've narrowed it down to when Adobe CS6 suits are also installed in our image that the office products will crash on Yosemite. Apparently Yosemite has some changes around the font framework and when Office builds it's database at first launch it crashes shortly afterwards. For me this is happening on our lab image as we delete profiles at restart. Hopefully a office patch will fix this as I doubt Adobe will change anything as their apps still work fine.

If I install Office 14.4.6 on it's own on Yosemite everything is fine btw.

[endor-moon]

I think perhaps Adobe Creative Cloud is also doing the same thing as CS6 as my systems had no remnants of CS6 installed. Good catch in any case. To summarize, the issue happens if you combine Adobe CS6 or CC with Yosemite and Office 2011 that has the 1446 patch installed. 1445 seems fine.

[SGill · Accepted solution]

I was able to eliminate this error in OSX 10.10.1 today by adding back in a missing apple component: "Java for OSX 2014-001" I'm seeing that App Store upgrades can delete this component required by Office 2011, so it needs restoring. Not sure about the Adobe factors with this, but I was getting the error described above and adding Java fixed it.

We get Office to launch clean and without hassle in shared areas by adding the com.microsoft.*.plists to the UT, btw…fill in the name and company with any info you want--that info is embedded in the office plists and pushed out to a new login via the UT. It's a little tougher if you can't reimage and have existing users, but at least you'll have this for when you can. Also, I would let font caches build dynamically on your workstations. Even larger collections should build in less than 15 sec.

It doesn't appear that Microsoft Office 2011 supports licensing via a server from OSX, unfortunately.

[gmarnin]

I too have seen this Office crash that endor-moon posted except I don't touch the default User Template. This is on 10.10.1 with a standard account. Like frank, I narrowed it down to Adobe CS6. To work around this bug, I first install Office 2011 and opened an app (Word for example) so Office can register it's font stash. Once that is done, I install CS6 and everything works normally.

If I install both at the same time without opening Office before installing CS6, which I typically do via Munki, Office will crash everytime.

[frank]

From a large scale deployment of labs opening office then installing adobe isn't going to work for me, I have over 400+ lab mac's to image in the space of 2 weeks.

BTW http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45122&Search=true Office 14.4.7 is out today.

No time at the moment to test and report back until next week at this stage.

[maser]

We see the same issue (just installing Office 2011 along with any single CS6 app via munki causes Word to crash for any user that initially logs in.)

14.4.7 does not resolve this.

It's clearly a font issue as if we pull all the non-10.10.1 fonts from /Library/Fonts -- including the MS and Adobe fonts -- then Word doesn't crash.

A *single user* workaround seems to be: login, run word. It'll crash. Log out, log back in. Word will "optimizing font menu preferences" and then be fine. But each user has to do that.

We're trying to figure out which font(s) actually are causing Word to barf as we -- like you -- can't deploy one set of apps and then defer installing CS6 apps until Office has been run -- because the crashing problem happens with every new user (including admin users) that log into the computer.

[endor-moon]

Any other updates to this issue? I'm afraid to deploy Yosemite until it is fixed. I'm now using 10.10.1 and yes, Java is installed.

[twest8]

Not a real solution but something workable over here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/macenterprise/CyUyPR7MFkk

Deploy 10.10, install programs, deploy 10.10.1, I'm testing now myself will report back if it fails.

[frank]

Thanks twest8, tested this and it worked for me.

Something in a new 10.10.1 build which is causing this, maybe 10.10.2 will fix it but for now we can install 10.10.0 and patch to 10.10.1 during deployment to allow office to run normally.

Thanks again

[calumhunter]

Well this has just screwed up my day...

[mscottblake]

Mine too. Had to spend a quarter of the day just creating new policies to be used for Self Service after imaging a lab.

It really is problems like this that makes me wonder if these big software companies even try their software on beta releases of the OS.

[castott]

Hey. We're working on putting together a Yosemite image for a large scale student deployment image that includes Adobe CC 2014 & Office for Mac 2011. Noticed that all Office apps were crashing shortly after startup. Crash log matched what we see above--turns out the update for Java for OSX 2014-001 resolved this for us as well.

[calumhunter]

+1 confirmed for me also

Adding Java for OSX 2014-001 to a 10.10.1 autoDMG image with Adobe CC 2014 and Office 14.4.7 works great.

Tested multiple times with and without the Java update and every time the java update is removed from the workflow Office apps crash on launch.

I also have the Java 8u25 installed as well, doesn't seem to be an issue

Nice find @Gillaspy !

[endor-moon]

I'm still getting the crash even with that new Java installed. Even with 14.4.7. Still says Blame Module Name: MicrosoftMenuLibrary.

[calumhunter]

whats your imaging workflow look like @endor-moon?
my workflow goes:
10.10.1.dmg
+Adobe CC
+Office 2011 14.3.0
+Office 14.4.7 update
+ Java 8u25
+ Java 2014-001
+ some config settings and apps like Firefox, chrome etc etc

Testing:
Log in as a local user (non-admin) and test office and adobe apps - all good

[endor-moon]

Strange, today's testing it is all working now without any problems.

[CasperSally]

We are looking at buying CC, but I don't have license yet to test with. Installing unpatched Java 2014-001 isn't an option for us.

Would love to know if the recently released 14.4.8 helps with this issue or if it remains if anyone has tested (does it freeze Word without Java 2014-001 installed).

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads?pid=Mactopia_Office2011&fid=B394D1C0-4D0D-4B85-BE48-22BBE71EADF6#viewer

[foigus]

Know this is late (and I've talked to CasperSally through other avenues) but Office 14.4.8 doesn't help this situation.

[endor-moon]

I'm still getting mixed results. The frequency of the Word crash seems to have dropped. We are using 10.9.5 and are staying away from Yosemite for the time being, until hardware forces us there. I agree, installing the old JRE isn't a very good idea in principle. And we still don't have a definitive answer of the cause or the solution, although the posting I marked as the answer definitely helps.

[beneb]

Same topic?

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=13692

[jimlee]

Found that if you launch Word, have it crash, log out, then relaunch Word again the issue will not occur, but this needs to be done for every user.

[foigus]

Does anyone else have an open Microsoft Support case for this issue--just looking to see if we can join together. Ours is 115020512367219.

[eng]

Guys,

Could you test this script and see if it fixes the issue for you?

https://gist.github.com/erikng/0982596f817af11965f4