Office upgrade to 14.5.0 as of May 12, 2015

Many thanks, this sorted my problem in the sense I have got most of my messages back. Unfortunately my archived files are missing. Any advice from anybody about this? Also, from experience, does anyone have any sense of the timescale for MS to resolve this sort of problem -- days, weeks, months?
Many thanks

David

I said the prompts in terminal worked for me however it seems to be a temporary fix. Whenever I close outlook I have to go to terminal again otherwise it won't open properly. Would love to know when the patch for this is coming out.

After a heap of testing and comparing plists with working and broken versions of Outlook 14.5.0, I've pinned it down the "NSOutlineView Items MailNavigationPane" array in the com.microsoft.Outlook.plist.

When you expand a nested folder a new item is written in this array. These seem to be the cause of the Main window not being display.

Rather than delete the whole Outlook plist, you can delete this array only, using the below:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy "/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook.plist" -c 'Delete "NSOutlineView Items MailNavigationPane"'

killall cfprefsd

Be sure to replace <username> with the username of the effected user.

This leaves the remaining prefs in tact and is less disruptive. The user just sees the folder structure collapsed.

It still needs to be run every time they close with the folders expanded. You could make a shell script to do this then launch Outlook as a work-around.

Microsoft Tech Support via remote control on my machine created a temporary fix. I’m not familiar with all the behind the scenes but he used Terminal and entered a few lines of code. I am now able to use Outlook but I my subject folders are not visible or accessible. I wonder if they will ever return, even after MS issues a new fix.

Thank you _jacob. What using the full kill script I lost all my account settings (have 9 mail accounts), and was unable to receive or send mail, but when changing to your script everything worked as usual. Just have to rerun the script every time I open Outlook after closing. But I guess that is standard fare for a Microsoft application....:(

This technique worked for me as well

I had the same issue on 2 macs, a 2014 MBA 13" i5 1.4 ghz and a 2011 MBP 15" i7 2.2 ghz, both running Yosemite 10.10.3.

On the MBA I rebuilt the database once, didn't fix it, I restored from a Time Machine back up of office, still no fix, then I reinstalled the original image file (.dmg) of office, that did the trick. Now knowing the fix, I tried in the MBP , same issue occurred but this time the reinstall of the dmg didn't work but I had skipped the rebuild and the Time machine restore thinking them irrelevant. So found this thread which did fix it for me on the MBP, once, then it happened again when I tested closing and reopening, then I re-ran the terminal procedure and it worked testing it for 5-6 relaunches.

Strange thing is I thought I would need to restore all previous updates since the original install but checking the Version number I had 14.4 on the MBA and 14.5 on the MBP, I guess the Time Machine backup did take after all, but is irrelevant to the issue.

Hi TSSR, you are a star. Had the same problem. Following your advise it has been absolutely easy to restore the program. Delete and reinstall from time machine - perfect! Less than 5 min!!! You saved us!!!!!! Thanks a lot!

This fix worked well. Thanks in a big way for it.

I've yet to shut down the program and reopen, but at least I have all my mail and folders back. I deleted the identity Outlook created on 5/13/15, then located the one that had all my files in it and tagged it. And, I identified the identity that the app used prior to this horrible update. When I restored Office from Time Machine, the program asked me to select an identity. I renamed my robust idenitity in case I need to relocate it in the future.

I also set to manual program updates. Until this issue is resolved I don't want to mistakenly reinstall the 5/13/15 update.

I hope this helps those of us who are novices out here.

Question about trashing the Office suite with the bad upgrade: I did this by dragging it into the trash. Now I can't empty the trash ("Some of the items are in use") because there's a folder in the Trash called "Microsoft Office 2011" and within that a subfolder called "Office," which contains a lot files all ending with ".framework." What do I do? Should I drag that "Office" folder out of the trash and put it somewhere "better"? (Sorry, computer dummy here.) Thanks again tssr.

You can not remove Office simply by dragging it to the trash.

Here are the directions for correctly removing Office, follow them exactly.

After I do these steps, then reinstall an earlier version from my Time Machine backup, will I need to type in the MS Office product code? If so, is there a limit to how many times you can install the Office suite? I thought I heard you can install it only a limited number of times, and this is the 2nd computer I've used it on. Thanks.

Csound1 wrote:

You can not remove Office simply by dragging it to the trash.

Actually, yes you can (as shown in the link you posted).

The link also shows how to remove the extraneous files used by MS Office.

Leaving these files will not affect the computer (except for using some space on the drive).

I didn't think a Time Machine restoration required an uninstall first. Am I wrong about this? Does it hurt anything by being in the trash for now? I haven't tried emptying the trash as yet. I just moved the program there. I now have Outlook restored, and that was the goal. I don't want to have any more difficulties as I have had enough already.

My preference is to only Restore, not uninstall unless I absolutely must. Must I?

Chris CA wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

You can not remove Office simply by dragging it to the trash.

Actually, yes you can (as shown in the link you posted).

The link also shows how to remove the extraneous files used by MS Office.

Leaving these files will not affect the computer (except for using some space on the drive).

Trashing the app is a small part of uninstalling, if you leave the rest of the files you have not removed it and some issues will return. Even MS caution against tossing it in the trash alone.