Recently, my  version of Office for Mac (Office 2011), started crashing on my MacBook Pro. Every time I launched Word, Excel or PowerPoint, the app would crash after a few seconds with an error asking if I wanted to recover my work, reopen the Office app and send the error to Microsoft. It didn’t matter if I opened a document directly or one of the Office applications, within a few seconds, the Office App would crash.

I went searching for a solution on various forums but only seemed to find other people encountering the same issue. Supposedly these crashes have been occuring sporadically even back to some Yosemite betas.

Possible Ways to Fix Mac Office 2011 Crashing in Yosemite

Unfortunately, what may work for some doesn’t always work for others. However, instead of sitting and waiting to see if a common solution would come available (and you know that Microsoft WILL eventually release a patch to correct the issue), I wanted to try to find some other solutions on my own and quickly. Here are a few that you can try. I have only tested one way that actually worked for me (which I noted below):

Uninstall & Reinstall Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac

Some people have said to completely uninstall Office 2011 and then re-install it. You can definitely try that, but it may just have the same problem once you download the latest Service Pack 3 (14.4.6) from Microsoft. I didn’t want to do that. I was convinced there was another solution to prevent Mac Office 2011 crashing in Yosemite.

Do a Light Cache Cleaning

Cutting to the chase here, using the latest version of Yosemite Cache Cleaner (a definitely great utility that is worth the money – it’s only $9.99), eliminated the issue. I ran a Light Cache Local Cleaning and rebooted my Mac and Office apps ran without issue. Note, you can use Yosemite Cache Cleaner in trial mode and I believe that you can run the Light Local Cleaning in that mode. I couldn’t test this because I paid for the software.

Interestingly, when I launched Word, it had to rebuild the Font Library.

So I decided to see if I could replicate the issue and the fix on a different computer. I installed the latest version of Yosemite (10.10.1) and then upgraded my Mac Office 2011 with the latest patch (14.4.6) which came out on 11/10/14 that seems to have caused the issue. Unfortunately, on two different machines, I could not replicate the error. That does not mean that it will not appear later on those machines.

Check Your Fonts

Another thing that I noticed (apart from the Font rebuild after doing the Cache cleaning) was that people were using Font Book to validate fonts. This may be part of the issue. You can check to see if you have any duplicate fonts and then delete the duplicates. Then reboot your Mac.

Delete the Font Cache

Again, I’m not convinced that the Fonts (specifically Microsoft ones) are the culprits of this issue and I had wanted to try to test this out. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I couldn’t duplicate the issue on other machines of mine. IF ANY THE FIXES HERE WORK, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT!

However, if you want to test this Font cache cleaning out, here is a free (and quite useful) utility that helps you do a variety of operations. OnyX (a free utility app) has been updated for Yosemite and has a section to clear out various caches including specific font caches. For those who have encountered the issue, please test using OnyX and see if you can delete the Microsoft Font Cache.
You can also delete the System, User and Apple fonts to test if those are causing issues.

Lastly, you can use OnyX to purge a lot of other system cache, so you can try to see if some of those will help the Mac Office 2011 Crashing in Yosemite issue. Remember: be sure PRIOR to doing any of these items, that you have a full backup of your Mac.

Did any of these fixes work for you? Did you encounter the Mac Office 2011 crashing in Yosemite? Please leave a comment letting me and others know what DID or DID NOT work.

HTD says: Hope this fix Mac Office 2011 Crashing in Yosemite worked for you! Let me know!