Microsoft replies on Office troubleshooting issues

Matt Centurión (of the Macintosh Business Unit) writes: "As more of our customers receive their copies of Microsoft Office v.X for Mac OS X we have started to hear reports of certain issues on launch that I would like to point out in order to help them get Office v. X up and running." He sent the following information:

Word/Excel/PowerPoint unexpectedly quit after showing the splash screen when optimizing fonts

We have found that many customers have fonts installed in their OS 9 Fonts folder that cause any Carbon application in OS 10.1 to crash when attempting to use it. Classic does not need to be running for this to happen (OS X automatically makes the OS 9 Fonts available to all applications). Crashes logged by Console will most likely have at the top line of the list the following text: "#0 ... In FindTablesInNFNT"

Apple's update to OS 10.1 (10.1.1) should fix this problem in most cases. If this does not fix the problem then please contact Product Support and please be prepared to send us the font in question (if that does not violate the license agreement of that font vendor) so that we can better serve you.

To find out more information about this issue, how to workaround it, and search for the corrupt font, please read this page.

All Office v. X applications start launching but never finish

Some of our customers have experienced an issue where opening an Office v.X application will cause the Application Icon to start bouncing in the Dock, but will never successfully finish launching. Sometimes a restart is required.

Many have identified this to be an issue with Carbon applications set to automatically start-up at log-in. Their workaround is to disable all applications in the Automatically Start-Up at Login list. This seems to be an issue with OS X and not just Office v.X.

Click on the following links to see more user responses and information on this issue: MacFixIt Forums thread; MacNN Forums thread.

All Office v. X applications crash when displaying the Project Gallery

Some of our customers have identified a particular file installed by Roxio's Toast product to cause this. Removing the file named "ToastVideoCDSupport.component" in the ~/Library/QuickTime folder alleviates the issue according to reports in this MacFixIt Forums thread.

[Note: MacFixIt staffer John Welch confirms: "If you have installed the Toast for OS X beta, dragging the ToastVideoCDSupport.component to your desktop fixes the Project Gallery crash."]

If this doesn't solve your problem, you can temporarily work-around the applications crashing on launch by double-clicking on an existing document which will launch the Office v.X without showing the Project Gallery. Then go into the Preferences dialog and turn off the “Show Project Gallery at Launch” option. One of your readers has already written in with that suggestion as well.

If the above information does not alleviate your problems, please contact Microsoft Product Support - where you can check for updated information. Apart from the forums linked above, you can also get help from other expert users by subscribing to our Newsgroups. For more information, see this page.