Office 2013 missing after June 11 Microsoft auto upates

Woohoo!  I have Office back!  Spent 3.5 hours on the phone with their escalate support desk and he remotely accessed my laptop.  Tried all your fixes Caine0001 but in the end had to refresh everything and effectively wipe all apps due to corrupted Windows files.  In those long silences when my laptop was 'doing stuff!' I asked if there were many others with the same problem and he said 'no' :).  When all restored I asked if there was anything I needed to do to stop it happening again and he said no, it was just one of those things.  Somehow I'm still wary and will probably turn off Office updates - just to be sure!  Can't really fault the guy - he fixed it in the end and will ring back tomorrow to check still ok. Just wanted to say thanks to you all for your help and support - especially Caine0001 - really appreciate it.  Technology is great, until it breaks :).  Hope everyone else gets sorted.

If you go back and re-read my posts I said that on the stubborn ones that you couldn't just do an uninstall and reinstall you would have to as a LAST resort redo Windows and then do Office. The uninstall and reinstall of Office works for most computers, but for the very few that it does not help you have to either be lucky enough to have a backup from prior to the crash of Office or you have to reinstall Windows to fix corrupt system files. But anyway, I understand your excitement, but I DID for real say that an extreme measure such as that would be necessary if the normal fixes didn't work.

And as far as him not mentioning to keep updates turned off, he is missing some data. Not only has common sense told everyone that if this happened after the June Office updates that it is something in the update, but Tech Support team leaders told the tech support guy I talked to that they knew it was something the update was doing to the registry. Not only that, but Microsoft released to industry leaders the information about the Office updates being the precursor to Office crashing on some computers. Of course they emphasized that it was only 1% of all users of Office, like that should make those affected feel better. Places like ZDNet and others were informed that the updates caused Office to crash. You can read it all over the internet. So, I am glad that you are up and running again, but believe me, you want to keep Office updates turned off, at least until this thing passes. Because it appears that the updates caused it and even if we find out that in the end it was not the Office updates, you are not hurting yourself by being careful.

I will tell you this much. Of the few dozen computers that I know of that have been fixed and that have kept Office updates turned off, not one has gone down again. One computer did go back down after almost 24 hours, but that user turned updates back on thinking they could get it to update to just past the Office SP1 that was released for C2R installs in February. Well, it doesn't work that way. When you turn on the Updates, it doesn't do them one month at a time in order. It updates them with the last one which has everything that has come out up til then. Well that computer had to be fixed again. This time updates have been left off and has not had a glitch since.

So, in conclusion, I am going to stick with the safe side and keep updates off until somebody proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that everybody has been wrong about this. Or until they fix it. And once again, I am happy for you. Just sorry you had to go down to scratch to get it fixed. But you are not alone, even if you are in the minority. Good luck from here on out!

Just an observation, but I was trying to remember the last time I heard of a major piece of software that was known to crash for a reason the manufacturer couldn't explain, and the only answer if you wanted to keep using it was to uninstall it and reinstall it every time it crashes. I mean, only Microsoft could get away with surviving something like that. Any other company would have lost their customers by now. That will probably happen if this keeps up with Office. I already heard from the Tech support team (you can see where I wrote it back near the beginning of this thread) that something like this happened on a much smaller basis a while back with Office. In fact, it happened to my wife's Windows 8 machine a few months ago. I had to reinstall Office completely for her and to prevent any downtime in the future, since she is still in school getting her Masters, I installed Office 2010 Professional Plus right along with it on the same machine. So she has her choice of which to use and if 2013 ever crashes again she can just open 2010 and keep rolling. They support the same formats, or at least everything we ever work with so there is no difference. We just like to use 2013 because its version of Outlook is better. Anyway, I was just thinking about how Microsoft can get away with this and not be losing a huge market share of customers. I mean really....  Who would buy a product and continue giving the manufacturer second chances like this except for Office users? That, I guess, is what I meant when i was saying to someone earlier that we allow them to get away with treating us like this by not moving on. If this 1% took its business elsewhere I think MS would think harder about testing before market and also about finding REAL fixes much faster. And before anyone gets too bent out of shape over this comment, I am not just thinking of this Office problem, but of a lot of other instances over the last 30 years of MS allowing an ill-prepared product to be launched or to lag in providing a true fix. Hopefully this will be fixed very soon, but the point stands. Something of this magnitude shouldn't be happening.... Heck, they have us trained so good that we are expressing appreciation that they are having to uninstall and reinstall the software to fix it. And they have gotten us trained so that we don't continue to call in and bother them because we can just uninstall it and reinstall it ourselves now. And my tech even called to ask if he could close my ticket because they acknowledge there is a problem and are trying to fix it! Hey, here is an idea: How about we close out tickets AFTER we find the real fix?  Just a thought.... :-)

Me too - just installed the update and nothing in Office works now. This has made it impossible for me to do my work and is costing $$$$. 

When will MS fix this???????

Frustrated doesn't even begin to describe it..

So far the only solution is to uninstall Office 2013 and reinstall it.

Same problem, what's the cure?

I have been using Linux a lot lately. I love it and I have far less problems overall. But that is not an option for a lot of people, sad to say.

Pretty much all programs have minimal hardware requirements. But when using a graphics card that has the minimal requirements and it still causes problems, it raises concerns. Especially when the OFFCAT.msi Office compatibility program runs and gives you the ok. If it is just the one card, you look at the card manufacturer. If it is several different cards then you look at a weakness in the programming of the software, such as Outlook. Too early to tell yet, but who knows. Microsoft trying to take advantage of hardware acceleration may be a problem for a number of reasons. Perhaps they need to perfect the manner in which Office does that. But who knows. It may not even be that. But, for a lot of computers it does seem to be involved. And I think that it is a little irresponsible for MS to expect all of its Office users to be knowledgeable enough to be able to isolate hardware acceleration as the problem and know how to fix it. Most of the people I assist would not even know how to look up a problem on the Microsoft website, much less how to implement a fix. Perhaps they need to improve the installation program's detection feature so that it does a better job of automatically turning off the feature when there is a chance it might cause  a problem.

But once again, that is just one man's opinion. A multi-billion dollar company is in a better position to deal with this that the average computer user. So I say, take the burden of dealing with whether to have it on or off from the end-user and lay it on the installation program. If that OFFCAT.msi program can determine if a computer is compatible with its hardware acceleration, then I say add its job to the installation and make Office do the work. Just a thought. Could save a lot of what we see going on right now, POSSIBLY.... Don't flame me. These are just thoughts on the subject that I think such a large company could do for its customer base.