Office 2008 12.1 SP1 (#2): documents not opening, crashes, more
Several workarounds for this problematic update.
[Thursday, May 15th]
Documents not opening Users, in droves, continue to report an issue in which Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents cannot be opened by double-clicking their icons after the Office 2008 12.1 (SP1) update. Instead, the documents must be opened using the File > Open command in the respective application.
MacFixIt reader Steve writes:
"The 10.5.2 master image I maintain -- shows this problem after the 12.1 update. Oddly enough, the 10.4.11 master image did not show the problem (with the same set of documents). I have a folder full of documents as a test (some mac created, some older WinWord documents, some brand new WinWord documents -- both .doc and .docx). The brand-new Word docs were created with Word 2007 SP1 with all patches as of yesterday.
"All 7 will open if I select all and "open" under Word 12.0.1 (on the 10.5.2 machine). All 7 open with Word 12.1 on the 10.4.11 machine. Only 4 of them will open on the 10.5.2 machine with Word 12.1."
Another reader writes:
"I can open them by double-clicking on them and, after the application opens, going to "Open" in the File menu and selecting the document. This only happens on my G5 (which I use at home). 12.1 works fine on my MacPro desktop at my office and my MacBook Pro laptop.
"Interestingly enough, it seems to happen most on documents that were created on Windows machines. I've not had much problem opening existing documents that were created under Office 2004 or the first version of Office 2008."
The definitive fix for this issue, though tedious, is to open the problematic documents using the File > Open command then re-save the documents. They should then open properly. See our tutorial regarding an inability to open documents for more workarounds.
Some users have also reported success with rebuilding the launchservices database with a utility like OnyX.
See yesterday's coverage for more.
Crashes Users also continue to report repeated crashes in Office applications after the update. One reader writes:
"Word crashes opening documents just created before the update in Word 2008. Repeatedly. I deleted the plist without effect."
Cannot install Users also continue to report problems installing the update. One reader writes:
"I tried to install the SP1 on Tuesday and at the time you have select the location where Office is installed, the SP1 installer does not find Office ! It says something in the style of "there is on this volume no version of the software found, required for the installation of this update."
If you are experiencing a similar issue, make sure that the Office 2008 folder is located at the root level of your /Applications directory.
Text distortion in Entourage One MacFixIt reader reports text distortion in Entourage after the update:
"After updating from Office 2004 to Office 2008, I noticed -- and reported -- that when I pressed the delete attachment button on an incoming email, weird text appeared across the folder list in the main Entourage window. My workaround was to use the Remove All Attachments command on the Message menu, which didn't seem to cause the same difficulty. Since updating to Office 12.1.0 yesterday, I have noticed that this problem now seems to have spread, occurring every time I try to remove an attachment using the Message menu,. The only workaround is to quit Entourage. Re-launching gives me back my clear window."
Similar issues? Please let us know.
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