Blurry text after update to Catalina. Outlook unreadable

Update your third party software is a good start.

Office for Mac running macOS Catalina

If you have Office 2011 for Mac or before WILL NOT run.

Office 2016 for Mac needs to be v15.35 or later.

Update the software or try an alternative for word documents—

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac


The current Office for Mac; Office 365 or Office 2019 (One-time purchase) are OK with Catalina

https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?&activetab=tab:primaryr1

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-do-i-upgrade-office-ee68f6cf-422f-464a-82ec-385f65391350

This stand alone includes Outlook—

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2019/cfq7ttc0k7cq?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

To activate a Microsoft Office 365 subscription you simply enter the email address you used when you extended the subscription with Microsoft.


If this is system wide— verify your default screen resolution:

>System Preferences>Displays

Change your Mac display's resolution - Apple Support

emilia108 wrote:

Was so hopeful this would work as not something I had tried but no luck! anything else you could recommend? thank you for all your help

Yes

To trouble shoot further you can:

  —Try a SafeBoot https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

  Takes noticeable longer to get to the login screen, does a 5-15 minute disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, including dynamic loader cache,  etc.  Login and test. Reboot and test as caches get rebuilt.

In Safe mode third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled, it removes malware, etc hampering smooth operation, however a  reboot will put it back to normal mode.

This test will tell you if third party interference; extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode. 

 —Test issue in another user (or guest user) account  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204443

  This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account. 

emilia108 wrote:

thank you for this,

I have outlook version 16.16.23 which was updated the same time as Catalina update so think this supposedly should work

but very blurry!

You can try restore System Fonts

~/Applications/Font Book.app> File > Restore Standard Fonts

please ref: Restore fonts that came with your Mac using Font Book ...