How do I disable a service?

Since installing the 14.3.0 update, the Office365Service has been crashing on me a couple of times a day, each time with an annyoing pop-up message. I don't use Office 365, and Word and Excel seem to run fine after the service crashes (I always choose not to restart it), so I decided to nuke it. The offending app can be found at Applications > Microsoft Office 2011 > Office > Office365Service.app. I appended "_Disabled" to the file name so Word and Excel wouldn't be able to launch it. The problem is, it seems that they need to be able to launch it, as Word and Excel strated crashing repeatedly. I renamed it back to Office365Service and the crashing problems went away. So unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to live with the Office365Service process and its crashiness, to avoid more crashes with my Office apps.

I'm also seeing the annoying crash restart dialog for the office365service and was about to disable it myself before finding your post. Hopefully they fix it soon since it appears that this buggy program is now required. 😟

If I would have known this trojan came with the Office update I would not have installed it.

I am seeing the same behavior - Office365Service crashes frequently with the annoying restart dialog. It restarts itself and then crashes within ~ 10 min. Would be great if MS fixes this. Up till now Office 2011 has been stable. I'm not using 365 service and would not have updated to 14.3.0 if I had known.

Same happening here: upgrade Office 2011, re-curring crashes. I believd the Office365Service is tied in some way to the Cloud versions of the Office apps in use with MS SkyDrive.

Add me to the frustrated users list. I have now unchecked the box to restart the service after the crash - I'll see what happens. So far my Word/Excel are working fine without it. Don't know what will happen in the near future, though.

+1 here.

Annoying as ****. At least it's harmless, or appears to be. I'd just as soon get rid of it. Don't need no more steenkin' cloud services, especially from Microworst.

The app is in the Microsoft 2011/Office/ folder. However, I don't have it autostarting, and I can't find anything that would start it besides the apps themselves.

Very annoying!! I kept getting the crash notices, so after poking around I found the process. I now kill it in Activity Monitor. Problem is, it's like a zombie; it comes back to life and you have to kill it again after every time you start-up any Office app. How do we drive a stake through its heart once and for all?

@allank "I have now unchecked the box to restart the service" - which checkbox is this you refer to?

I am also having this problem which is driving me mad. I never wanted anything to do with the Office365 service which Miscrosoft have foisted on me with this release without even asking!

ncollingridge,

When it crashes and the pop-up appears, there is a checkbox at the lower left that says something like "...restart the service." However, don't bother, because that doesn't work, either. Keeps coming back regardless.

I have now decided to "Report" every crash. If Microsoft really gets these reports, then maybe if we inundate them with the reports they just may find time to do something about it.

Cheers,

I too have updated to the most recent Office 2011, and the service doesn't run on my Mac.

Can one of you that is having the problem check these directories for something like com.microsoft.Office365.plist:

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/StartupItems (it will be a folder in this direcory)

~/Library/LaunchAgents

~/Library/LaunchDaemons

~/Library/StartupItems (it will be a folder in this direcory)

~/ means your user account Library which you can access by holding down the Option (alt) key and selecting Library from the Go menu in Finder.

If the programs are launcing that service themselves, then I would think it would also affect my Mac, but it doesn't. So, I imagine it has installed a launchd item, but I don't have that item.

The only thing that shows up, using the simplified search term "Office365" is the application itself, in the MS Office folder. No plist. Nothing in the global library, or the user library that refers to it.

The application name is Office365Service. It runs when one of the Office apps launches.

If the programs are launcing that service themselves, then I would think it would also affect my Mac, but it doesn't. So, I imagine it has installed a launchd item, but I don't have that item.

I opened Excel, Office365Service launched. Since I started writing this post, it has appeared and disappeared from Activity Monitor. It doesn't show up in the Excel Preferences, not even to connect with Office365 in the cloud. It may be a listener, that opens and closes, supposedly silently, to monitor those documents that you may want to push to the cloud service. Since it shows up only when it crashes, my guess is that the listener app is buggy (duh). There should be a way to disable it, or have it not load at all when the cloud service is not being used. A toggle in MS Office apps, maybe a global preference pane to disable it?