Today is the day that Apple is releasing El Capitan for users around the globe and if you are thinking about running the latest version of Office 2016 with this new OS, you need to be aware of performance issues.

I have been running the GM candidates and the release build of El Capitan since it was first announced by Apple as well as running the release version of Office 2016 for Mac and the experience is atrocious. I am not alone in this either, there is a lengthy thread in Microsoft’s Answer forums that is filled with other users who have the same issue and users on Twitter are quite vocal about problem as well.

Office 2016 on El Capitan is unstable and virtually impossible to use on my machine; all of the apps crash multiple times a day. To top it off, I have had the error reporting mechanism crash (above image) while trying to send my crash log after Outlook bit the dust. The crashing is so bad that I cannot trust the apps to work long enough to accomplish anything meaningful which renders my Mac useless for daily tasks.

When trying to write this post using Office 2016 on El Capitan, Word crashed twice. For those who use a Mac every day with Office, you may want to wait on upgrading to El Capitan as the problem appears to be more widespread than Microsoft is admitting.

Some users have reported no issues post upgrade but for those that hit this bug, it’s a show-stopper. Further, I have yet to find a work-around to prevent these crashes; it does appear to be most prevalent after resuming from sleep.

Microsoft has released a few updates, at least for Outlook, that they said would address this issue but so far, nothing has stabilized the apps.

If you have run across this issue, make sure to let Microsoft know in its Answer forums so that they see how widespread this issue has become but for now, I would not recommend installing Office 2016 on El Capitan.

Tagged with Office 2016 for Mac