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Office 2011 Media Browser

I'm having problems using the media browser in the new Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac application. Word, Powerpoint, and Excel application all crash when I choose Insert>Photo>Photo browser. The applications crash when choosing any of the media browsers (photo, audio, video, etc.) Each time I choose to insert from the browser the browser starts up for a second then crashes followed by the Send Error Report window. Anyone have any ideas?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Nov 8, 2010 9:01 PM

27 replies

Feb 19, 2011 11:24 AM in response to Casey Allen Goodson

I'm having the same problem. I've tried all the things listed in the discussion. If I log in as another user it works. I've been on the phone with Microsoft and apple. No help there. Did you ever get your problem resolved?

J.D.L.

Level 1

43 points

Feb 25, 2011 8:11 PM in response to peacerose

One possible solution...

There may be a file in your User "Movies" folder that is causing the hang. Try moving all of your user "Movies" folder files to the desktop, run MS Word, and open Word's Media Browser. If it works, put each movie file back one by one (closing and re-opening MS Word and Media Browser each time). Then you will know what the offending file is.

Not sure what the correlation is, but it worked for me. I found a bad iMovie file that was causing my MS Word Media Browser to hang. I removed the file from my User "Movies" folder and the Media Browser worked without a hitch.

Feb 27, 2011 4:16 PM in response to J.D.L.

J.D.L. --- You are brilliant!! Thank you so much. I did everything you said, moved my movie folder to desktop and replaced them one by one. Apparently, I had a couple of stray photos/shots in one of my movies. I deleted those and everything went well. Next time I'm in the Apple store I'll let them know the solution. They weren't able to help me, although they tried. I hope others with this problem will use the forum to find the solution. Again, thank you.

J.D.L.

Level 1

43 points

Mar 6, 2011 6:45 AM in response to peacerose

Glad it helped PeaceRose! I am not sure it will work in all cases, but at least it is something to try. Please share the potential solution with others so that they can hopefully rectify this frustrating problem.

Mar 10, 2011 4:18 PM in response to J.D.L.

J.D.L. - add me to your list of happy people. I've been messing around with duplicate fonts for a few days (per the MS discussion forum suggestions), trying to figure out why the media browser crashed in my account (but not on others in my MacBook Pro). I just moved the contents of my Movies folder to the desktop, and the Media Browser works again! Woo-hoo!

Again - many thanks!

ivansky

Level 2

284 points

Mar 12, 2011 6:16 PM in response to J.D.L.

J.D.L. - Many thanks! I moved some of the larger movie folders out of my "Movies" folder into a new folder on the desktop, and now my media browser in Microsoft Word 2011 does not hang any more! Thank you so much for solving a problem Microsoft themselves gave up on. I will need to do some cleaning up as the movies are ones I wanted to keep, so it's not a perfect solution, but it sure is a big big improvement!

I spent quite a lot of time cleaning up fonts using Font Book as described in other forums, and had given up as the problem persisted. It was a great pleasure to revisit this thread and find a solution that works.

Ivan

Mar 18, 2011 9:19 AM in response to Casey Allen Goodson

I too removed duplicate fonts and troublesome movies. Neither solution helped. I reluctantly began to think that the media browser would never work for me-until this morning. I ran Disk Warrior to fix my permissions and repair files. When looking at the Disk Warrior report I noticed a lot of references to media browser permissions that were fixed. As soon as I read the report I opened Word and tried the media browser. AMAZING....The browser works fine.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Mar 18, 2011 9:47 AM in response to ivansky

Having large amounts of data on your Desktop is a good way to slow your system down.

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Allan

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Sep 3, 2011 1:15 AM in response to Casey Allen Goodson

THIS FIXES THE PROBLEM

http://www.geeklane.com/2011/05/04/office-2011-mac-crashing-when-inserting-symbo ls/

got2ske

Level 1

0 points

Sep 10, 2011 5:29 PM in response to J.D.L.

J.D.L., thanks for the post back in February! I was having the same issue and kept resorting to using Word 2008 instead of troubleshooting. Today I finally searched the forums and found this. Moving the few movie files I had to Desktop and then back again (also after opening each one in QuickTime Player) did the trick. This is also described in the article shared by highestwater in their Sep 3 post. Thanks all!

TelJones

Level 1

14 points

Nov 23, 2011 2:16 AM in response to J.D.L.

+1 This worked for me too. Many thanks!

JanGH1

Level 1

0 points

Apr 15, 2012 5:32 PM in response to Casey Allen Goodson

I had the same issues as the original poster. I tried the trick of moving the Movies folder to the desktop, but this didn't work for me. I could still hear the disc drive(s) active when the Media browser was opened - as the beach ball continued to spin. So what worked for me, was to just eject all the attached hard drives from my desktop that I have connected to my iMac and Bingo! the media browser now worked.

I can only assume that Office 11 was searching my back up hard drives and finding multiple copies of each movie, photo and song.

I don't know if Time Machine would affect Office 11 the same way. Anyway, thought I'd let you know what worked with my particular set up...

Thanks for getting me on the right path!

Office 2011 Media Browser