el capitan microsoft word problems

Hi - I hear so many good things about this el capitan update, but to me it's been horrible. Not only do I not see any significant improvements, it's caused my most crucial programs to hopelessly crash. Every time I try to open Microsoft Word (2011), it immediately crashes and I get a Microsoft crash report error message. As a grad student in thesis, it's nothing short of disastrous. Thank God for Dropbox.

In desperation, I downloaded LibreOffice... which also crashed immediately on first launch. I can't get that to open either.

I can access and edit my docs in Pages, I guess, but I've never even used it before. And I can't create Word docs in it.

Also, Picasa crashes every time I try to open it. Picasa is how I view and edit photos I'm using for my thesis project. I do not know what to do.

I'm not a programmer or even that computer-savvy, and I have not the slightest clue how to fix this. I tried to revert using Time Machine but even that's not working. I've done Disk Utility / First Aid, Disk Doctor, etc. - not a bit of help.

Any and all information and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.