Where have my MS icons gone in Yosemite?

I really like Yosemite, but one thing I noticed right away was that my MS document icons all turned white on the desktop. If I open a Finder window they appear in the List view, Column view and Cover Flow (does anyone use that anymore?) but not in the Icon view. Any ideas?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 18, 2014 5:50 AM

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127 replies

Oct 22, 2014 3:54 PM in response to Barney-15E

It is an issue that can affect anyone with a clean install of yosemite. I've put a clean install of yosemite onto my 3 month old Mac Pro and this issue surfaced. Repeated clean install show no improvement. My issue is that if they cannot quality control enough to prevent this from happening, what else have they overlooked? I spent 4 hours online with their support and they cannot fathom a solution.

Oct 30, 2014 7:32 AM in response to shylocxs

Has anyone had a similar blank icon issue with iOS8? Some of my app icons on my new iPhone 6 have reverted to a white background with a pattern of black vertical and horizontal grid lines and superimposed concentric circles. Weird. I also have blank Microsoft icons in Yosemite, but only Word and Powerpoint. Excel are OK. If you make aliases to the 'blank' documents, they have proper icons!

Nov 5, 2014 8:19 AM in response to Pyrotechnic 2014

There is something to this. I had the /Library/Caches/ folder just open for a few seconds while I looked through it (I didn't delete anything). My MBP had a sudden hard freeze and the screen went black with strange vertical bars on it. I turned it off, rebooted... and now all my icons are working as normal. All my PSDs and INDD files, etc. all have the proper app icon. Very very odd.


My Yosemite install was a clean one, fwiw.

Nov 6, 2014 1:17 PM in response to shylocxs

I was experiencing the same problem with MS Office (mainly Word and Excel) and VLC. I tried all the basic actions I could think of, such as copy/pasting the icon after hitting 'Get Info' or running the 'Yosemite Cache Cleaner'; none worked. Manually deleting the cache folders and rebooting magically solved this issue!


  1. Delete the contents (including hidden files) of the following Cache folders:
    1. /Library/Caches
    2. /System/Library/Caches
    3. /Users/{YOUR_USERNAME}/Library/Caches
  2. Reboot

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Where have my MS icons gone in Yosemite?

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