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Office upgrade to 14.5.0 as of May 12, 2015

This new update to Office for Mac 2011 can be fatal. Once installed, I can no longer open an Outlook window for e-mail, contacts, etc.


After 3 hours on the phone with MicroSoft, they admitted that the update is flawed. Right now they have no fix.


I WOULD URGENTLY RECOMMEND TO NOT INSTALL MS OFFICE UPDATE VERSION 14.5.0.


Has anyone else experienced this and survived with their Outlook in tact?

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 12, 2015 7:41 PM

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244 replies

May 12, 2015 10:15 PM in response to David-Sk

David, I also spent 2 hrs on the phone with MS tech support. I had to endure and watch by remote a whole manual uninstall/ then try a reinstall of Office using our MS 365 account, even though I explained at the outset to MS that this loss of Outlook was straight after 14.5.0 update instal and this was most likely the issue. Yes, MS tech conceded there is an Outlook issue with the 14.5.0 update. DO NOT INSTAL 14.5.0, stay on 14.4.9 until resolved, fingers xxx.. MacPro 2011, running 10.10.3. Hoping for a fix, and my email history/ contacts retrievable

May 13, 2015 1:55 AM in response to David-Sk

Figured out a fix....


First I used Clean My Mac 2 is uninstall Office 2011...all components....select everything. It should take a couple minutes. It left some files in the main Office 2011 folderthat resides where all the other applications are. Trash all that then empty the trash. Then I went to my most recent Time Machine backup before I updated to 14.5.0. Found the Office 2011 folder in my Applications. Note...It took several minutes for the Time Machine window to populate all the applications. After about 2 minutes on my machine I could see the Office 2011 folder. I highlighted it and hit restore. And in a couple minutes Office 2011 14.4.9 was back on my computer and Outlook opened up just fine. I was in shock!!


Hope this helps all that have fallen down the MS rabbits hole with 14.5.0 Here's the worst part of it...14.5.0 is still up on the MS site as a downloadable update.


btw...I'm running a Mid 2012 15" MacBookPro 10.10.3 2.7 GHz Core i7 16Gig of Ram

May 13, 2015 2:22 AM in response to David-Sk

If you have a (Time Machine) backup you can simply delete the newly updated Microsoft Office 2011 folder in your Applications folder and restore the whole Microsoft Office 2011 folder back to your Applications folder. This will restore v14.4.9 (or the last version you backed up) and everything will work again until Microsoft issues a fixed update.

May 13, 2015 2:43 AM in response to David-Sk

I tried updating my Mac Office 2011 running under Yosemite, but haven't had a single issue yet, if this is a world wide issue i think this post would have had a lot more posts.


if looking at the history on older update from 14.1...... there have been similar issues where people couldn't start Outlook, and was the same story over again.


there most be something different on the installation where it fails

May 13, 2015 3:18 AM in response to Mooock

it is not happening to everyone but it is happening to some people which is obviously why it wasn't spotted by Microsoft before releasing the update. However, there is no rhyme or reason as to who it affects. We're getting reports from multiple clients on *some* machines but not others. One client has identical laptops with identical software setup and email configuration and it has affected some but not others. As the issue does affect some people and the result is pretty disastrous if you are affected (no email capability) we would recommend on holding off installing this update until more information is available from Microsoft…

May 13, 2015 5:47 AM in response to tssr

TSSR...Your advice helped me best of all. I did not lose my folders for saved/moved emails stored "On my computer". Also, with this method I did not have to reinstall my entire Office 2011 software. I just looked at my latest backup time on the icon from my menu bar first, then I selected the backup on that date that contained the entire Microsoft Office 2011 application (as there were multiple restore points for that particular date, and not all were complete folders), I chose the folder that contained the actual programs as well (Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, etc).


Presto, all is back as it were at version 14.4.9 prior to that horrible 14.5 update. I will be certain to check the Apple discussion forums prior to any future updates in the future. Thanks to all of you that posted helpful restore tips...without you, the rest of us would be SOL. 😉

May 13, 2015 6:39 AM in response to David-Sk

I faced the same problem. Surprisingly what helped to recover the situation was answer to this:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macofficepreview-macinstall/office- preview-crashes-at-startup/343455aa-5257-48be-babc-8e8f65196756


namely the steps:

1. Open Terminal

2. Type defaults delete com.microsoft.Outlook (to delete the old preferences).

3. killall cfprefsd (to kill the cached prefs)

4. Launch Outlook

Pressed 'continue' on the intro screen and so far Outlook 2011 is opening windows.

Not sure if this is a permanent solution, as I did Identity DB rebuild several times and switching identities oand nce I was able to start Outlook with all windows open, but then, after closure it went to the same state without any windows (can't find an explanation how and why). So this problem seems not to be very straightforward and might be difficult to reproduce for Microsoft. I think it depends on user environment whether upgrade to 14.5.0 will cause no issues or vice versa.


Currently Outlook seems to work, under monitoring..

Office upgrade to 14.5.0 as of May 12, 2015

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