After Apple released the new OS X El Capitan on Wednesday, users streamed to a Microsoft support discussion forum to report that Office 2016 for Mac regularly crashed, crippling their productivity.
'This is beyond the Pale. We basically can't use Office on our computers,' wrote Watson Scott Swail today on the longest thread related to the crash problem.
Existing Office 2016 for Mac customers will be seamlessly upgraded to 64-bit versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote as part of the August product release (version 15.25). This affects customers of all license types: Retail, Office 365 Consumer, Office 365 Commercial, and Volume License installations.
'I finalized the El Capitan upgrade this morning and since then I can't use my Mac with Office 2016 any longer .. Multiple random crashes from any of the Office 2016 apps,' added Francisco Chaves, also today.
The discussion thread where Swail and Chaves posted their complaints had over 140 messages and had been viewed more than 13,300 times, both extremely large numbers for Microsoft's Office for Mac support forum.
While the thread's kick-off message was posted July 25, about two weeks after Microsoft shipped Office 2016 for Mac and Apple delivered the first public beta of OS X 10.11, aka El Capitan, the volume of messages added to the thread swelled yesterday, when Apple released the OS X upgrade.
Some Computerworld staffers have been experiencing the same irregular crashes of Office 2016 applications, notably Outlook, but also Excel and Word, that have been reported on Microsoft's support forum.
The application crashes and the ensuing lock-ups come at various times and when performing various chores with the software, users said. Some have seen Outlook go dead when their Macs awoke from sleep, others asserted that the downfall of one Office application caused all other open Office applications to crash as well, while a few noted that even after a crash, the applications were unresponsive, requiring a Mac restart to clear the decks.
Computerworld has seen all those scenarios, too.
'If I have more than one Office app open and a crash occurs on one of them, the other one locks up too,' wrote a user identified only as 'EJZK' today. 'But only the Office apps. Other apps continue to work fine.'
Typical for a peer-to-peer support forum, users proposed multiple solutions and forwarded a host of theories about the crash cause. Invariably, others chimed in to say that the speculated fixes did nothing to help them, or disagreed with another's technical diagnosis.
But the one area of agreement was that the situation was untenable and unacceptable.
'This issue has been happening on [OS X 10.11] beta for months. And it appears that Microsoft still isn't doing anything about it,' said Swail in a later post. 'As someone else reported, they know about this but do not appear to be doing much about it. It is not an Apple issue. It is a [Microsoft] issue. All my other programs are fine, including the entire Adobe suite, which I think is infinitely more complex than Office.'
'Any sane developer should be proactively ensuring compatibility with GM [golden master] prior to release,' added 'fryle' today. 'That's kind of the point of GM. Otherwise you get what we're seeing now: customers upgrading to El Cap and finding Office, a mission-critical suite for most people, is now broken. At worst, Microsoft hasn't taken this seriously enough, and at best, it hasn't been communicating with its customers well enough. There has been no advisory (to my knowledge) warning of the known issues and certainly no ETA on a fix. It's disappointing, to say the least.'
'Golden master' is a term used to describe the last testing release of an upcoming program or operating system. Run traceroute on mac. Apple released the first El Capitan GM on Sept. 9.
It's unclear whether Microsoft's or Apple's code was responsible for the Office 2016 crashes, or a combination of both. Computerworld has experienced similar Office 2016 crash behavior on the GM and official releases of El Capitan, as well as on a Mac equipped with the public preview of OS X 10.11.1. The Office applications were downloaded from Microsoft's website as part of both consumer and commercial subscriptions to Office 365, which provide rights to locally install the suite on up to five Macs.
The Sept. 23 update that Microsoft released for Office 2016 for Mac did not stop the crashes for Computerworld.
Microsoft did not immediately reply to a request for comment and whether it had a fix in the works.
But someone identified as Sunder Raman -- who said he was a program manager on the Mac Office team -- left several comments on a story about the crashes published earlier today on Thurrott.com. There is a 'Sunder Raman' listed on Linkedin.com, who has a title of senior program manager for Outlook on Mac.
'We have been working with Apple through the Beta period and have collectively resolved several issues,' Raman said as he responded to criticism that Microsoft dallied during OS X 10.11's three-plus months of developer previews. 'Some issues are hard to isolate given the nature of hardware configuration differences like graphics cards, number and type of accounts used, etc.'
Microsoft has acknowledged a different issue with Outlook 2011, the predecessor to the email client bundled with Office 2016, on El Capitan. In a support document, Microsoft said it was 'researching the problem,' which caused Outlook 2011 to crash when trying to sync with an email server.
Office 2016 for Mac sells for either $150 or $230 in perpetual license form, or is available with an Office 365 subscription, which range in price from $70 to $240 annually for the entry-level consumer plan and the most expensive corporate deal, respectively.
It’s slowly approaching five years since Microsoft first released Office for Mac 2011 in October 2010. While a final version of Office 2016 for Mac isn’t ready just yet, Microsoft is announcing a preview program today for Mac users to get an early look at the company’s work. Microsoft has been doing some great work with Office, bringing it to the iPad, extending it to Dropbox, and even acquiring impressive apps like Acompli to power Office on iOS and Android. Office 2016 for Mac is the latest result of Microsoft’s focus on cross-platform apps, and it finally matches its Windows equivalent.
The first thing I noticed about using Office 2016 for Mac is the user interface. While the existing 2011 version looks old in comparison, Microsoft hasn’t ditched parts of the aging UI entirely. It looks and feels like a mix of the fresh Windows design and Office for Mac 2011. 'We think we’ve done a good job of striking a balance that customers expect,' explains Eric Wilfred, the head of Microsoft’s Office for Mac apps, in an interview with The Verge. 'Our internal tagline, and we’re actually corny enough to say this in the hallways, is 'Unmistakably Office and optimized for the Mac.' The result is the familiar Ribbon user interface that fits in with the OS X theme and features like sandboxed apps, fullscreen view, and Retina screen optimization.
OneDrive cloud storage is built straight in Like Office 2013 for Windows, Microsoft is integrating its cloud storage services directly into Office 2016 for Mac. That means Office 365, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and Sharepoint are all integrated. If you use OneDrive to store and edit Office documents with an iPad or a Windows laptop, then you can quickly access them from the recent documents location in Office 2016 for Mac. Microsoft’s cross-platform app strategy, powered by the cloud, is a reality, and this is the latest piece of the puzzle.
Word 2016 for Mac looks a lot like the iOS and Windows equivalents, and Microsoft is supporting co-authoring to allow several people to simultaneously edit a document. Alongside co-authoring, there’s also new threaded comments to track comments more easily next to the relevant text. Microsoft is also adding a new navigation pane to quickly flick between pages in Word documents, better dictionary support, and a style pane to apply styles to an entire document. The vast majority of Word features are what you’d expect from the existing Office for Mac, but everything feels a little more polished thanks to the new look and feel.
Excel now has the same Windows keyboard shortcuts Excel has some more significant changes. If you’re a Windows user that switches between Mac and PC, then you’ll be pleased to learn that the Excel keyboard shortcuts are now consistent between Mac and PC versions of Office. That means you can use ctrl + shift shortcuts instead of cmd + shift. As someone who regularly switches between a Mac and Windows PCs, I’m very thankful for this change. Of course, you can still use the cmd shortcuts if you’re used to them. Microsoft is also adding slicers to re-pivot data, printing to PDF, a full formula builder, and autocomplete improvements.
PowerPoint picks up an improved presenter view, new slide transitions, and an overview of all animations in a slide deck. The new presenter view allows you to see notes alongside slides, and the additional slide transitions give you more ways to keep your audience awake with crazy animations. There’s not a huge amount of change to PowerPoint, but like the rest, it more closely matches the Windows version.
Office 2016 for Mac will also include Outlook and OneNote, both of which have been available on Mac for some months now. While Outlook for iOS is amazing, the Mac equivalent falls short for several reasons. There’s no account picker, which results in a confusing and frustrating way to add your account at first, and it’s surprising that Microsoft hasn’t even optimized the app for its own Outlook.com service. Otherwise, it’s a good combination of email, calendars, and contact management for those who are familiar with Outlook and rely on Exchange day to day.
Overall, during my testing I noticed that Office 2016 for Mac doesn’t seem that much faster than Office for Mac 2011. I’ve grown tired of using Office for Mac 2011 as it’s simply not fast enough and reliable enough for my needs, and I’m disappointed there haven’t been many performance improvements nearly five years later. I was hoping for a lightweight version of Office for Mac, but there’s hope yet. 'We have focused a lot on performance in the run up to getting preview out, and we believe we’ve got it to the point where it’s worth getting feedback,' explains Wilfred. 'We know that we’re not done, we have more performance work to do before general availability.'
Final version available this summer
Speaking of availability, Microsoft is aiming to have this ready in time for summer, with a release focused on Office 365 customers once the bits are ready. Microsoft is also planning to sell the suite of apps standalone, but the company is not yet announcing pricing or exact availability dates. If you’re interested in testing out Office 2016 for Mac then you can download a copy over at Microsoft’s Office site.