Q: Where have my MS icons gone in Yosemite?

ACPLE wrote:

Would be nice if they just released a quick patch for it though. That and all the other probs!

Since it is a minor problem apparently isolated to only a few users, where exactly are they going to find the source of the problem in order to fix it?

The only way they can provide a “patch” would be if they could reproduce the problem.

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.

Well, their “quality control” has prevented it from happening on my Mac, “dirty” install and all.

Ran this: http://www.northernsoftworks.com/download.html yosemite cache cleaner - did medium cache cleaning. Cleared logs. All icons now working after reboot.

Ran this: http://www.northernsoftworks.com/download.html yosemite cache cleaner - did medium cache cleaning. Cleared logs. All icons now working after reboot.

UPDATE - All icons except MS Excel files stopped working again so this is a Yosemite bug...for some of us. I do not have this problem on two of my other Macs...go figure.

Sorry. Though I had it nailed.

Agreed!

This is so random and weird. On a 2012 A1289 Mac Pro, I'm having the 'blank' icon issue with 3-4 apps. On a 2006 A1226 MacBook Pro, I'm not seeing the issue. One would normally think that the older model should be exhibiting the issue over a newer model. :-/

This seems to work:

Right click on a MS icon > Show view options > Check 'Show icon preview'

At this point, all icons show: doc, docx, xlsx, etc. If you make the icons big, then they are no longer white, & look as they did in earlier versions of OS.

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!

I don't have anything to add, but just wanted to say that I'm having the same issue as you guys. Icons for files are the generic white paper icon (depending on the icon size used in Finder). Extremely annoying.

Gents. I had the same issue and followed the guidance for manually removing Cache Folders as described here. Worked a treat, however, I didn't remove the individual files as it described, i just got rid of the folders in their entirety, emptied the bin and rebooted. All my pdf and docx files now have previews in list view.

Hope it works for you?

Sadly, it doesn't

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.

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