Thursday, June 30, 2016

Excel 2016: Spell Check Causing Applicaiton Lock

Office 2016 has been very unstable.  Microsoft is tacitly admitting as much by releasing a steady stream of updates.

One of the persistent problems has been the spell check function in Excel.  Simply put, when you attempted to spell check a worksheet, the application would lock-up.  After a failed spell check, quitting the application normally was impossible; the only way to shut Excel down was to Force Quit it.

The spell check issue persisted despite the ongoing MS updates.  I myself experienced the problem on two separate MBPs and after no less than six removals and reinstalls.  Eventually I found a procedure that seems to have resolved the spell-check nightmare:
  • Drag all MS Office 2016 documents to the trash
  • Go to ~/Library/Group Containers and delete the following files
    • *.office
    • *.ms
    • *.officeosfwebhost
  • Empty trash
  • Restart and re-install Office 2016 (applying all updates)
 After performing the above steps Excel spell check is working.  At least until the next MS update.

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