Office 2004 11.3.5 (#4): Preparing for the update; more problem reports; more

Prior backup enouraged Following up on yesterday's ongoing coverage of Microsoft's Office 2004 11.3.5 update, readers are encouraged to take due precautions before applying the update. In particular, as with any application update, there's nothing quite like having a recent backup of a successfully working copy of the application, on which to fall back in case of trouble.

Having a backup strategy is a fundamental part of MacFixIt's philosophy of Macintosh maintenance. If you don't have a backup strategy, please, get one. External hard drive prices are low, and even if you don't want to grapple with the complexities and expense of a sophisticated incremental backup solution such as Retrospect, there are many cheaper, simpler alternatives; a straightforward disk duplicator, such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, is reliable and easy, and can greatly contribute to your peace of mind in times of update-induced stress.

Inability to perform the installation One reader writes:

"My MBP Pro 2.33 froze during installation of the update and now keeps freezing when I try to start it up. It happens in all cases, safe boot and from a new user account."

And, from another reader:

"I have an Intel Mac, and when the MS updater runs I get the whole computer shutting down [kernel panic]. I managed to get it to run once and ended up without Word. Re-installed everything and tried again. The kernel crash happened again."

Missing application The above report seems to imply that after the update, Word was missing. This is not the only such case. We reported earlier one reader's experience of Entourage going missing after the update. And a recent email from a reader says:

"I installed the update via auto update and when completed Excel was totally gone!"

Other miscellaneous problems A reader writes:

"We're experiencing a problem with PowerPoint 11.3.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.9. Open a new PowerPoint document. Insert > Picture > From file... (I inserted a .jpg image). Flip the image horizontally. Save and quit. Open the document and image has been flipped back to the original orientation. Flip vertical seems to work fine."

Possible fixes for crashes Reader Gareth writes: "Removing Office / Startup / Word / StuffIt Word X Add-In solved my crashing Word problem after updating."

That note is a salutary reminder that third-party Office plug-ins dwell in the Startup folder, inside the Office folder. Such plug-ins have always been a notoriously risky cause of unpredictable behavior. If you have such plug-ins and your Office application is crashing or otherwise acting strange, quit the Office application, move the plug-ins to the desktop, and see if things get better.

Correction to yesterday's advice In yesterday's article on this topic, we proposed, as a strategy for undoing the update and reverting to an earlier version, that you delete the entire Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Late in the day, we corrected that proposal with an important caveat.

Due to the obtusely non-standard architecture of its installation, Microsoft Office keeps some user customization files, not in the user's home folder (along with the rest of the material in Documents / Microsoft User Data), but in the Office application folder itself.

(Please, don't get us started on how terrible this is. For one thing, it means that all users are affected by customizations that might be intended for just one user. For another, it means that users are required to place customizations in a location for which they may not have write access.)

• The Templates folder is one possible location for such customization files; you might have your own templates in the My Templates subfolder.

• The Office / Startup folder, as mentioned above, can hold global templates, third-party plug-ins, and so forth.

Thus, before deleting the Microsoft Office 2004 folder, be sure to retrieve any such customization files and move them aside for possible future reinstallation.

Feedback As always, we encourage readers to keep us apprised of their problems, solutions, responses to our suggestions, and so forth. Just email us at Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Previous coverage:

• Office 2004 11.3.5 (#3): Undoing the update; Applications crash on launch (cont.) -- fixes; more
• Office 2004 11.3.5 (#2): Word crashes; Entourage missing; Documents will not open
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.3.5 released: security, stability, performance enhancements

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