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.

Windows 2008 R2: Members of the local "Administrator" group do not have admin rights to shares

We have received many reports of a problem with Windows 2008 R2 servers where shares containing the local "Administrator" group were not accessible by members of that group.

For example: we have a GPO that makes our "Domain Admin" group a member of the local Administrator group of all our servers.  However, when a Domain Admin would log onto a server he would not have access to server shares.

We resolved the problem by  disabling User Account Control (UAC) on the server.  This Microsoft KB article describes how to turn UAC off in Server 2008 R2.

For a full overview of UAC and how to turn it off/on on other servers see this KB.

Note: these changes require a restart.