Trying Office 2016 Preview

I decided to install the preview of Office 2016 on my main machine here to give it some actual testing. Short version of this article: it was a complete bust and I have been moderately inconvenienced.

Since the organization through which I get Office 365 has not enabled preview versions for installation, I chose the download under "Don't have Office 365?" on the product info page. The installer told me that it would remove the old version (Office 2013) from my computer, and I said OK to that. (It's always possible to reinstall the stable 2013 version after removing the preview.) So I waited for the installer to do its thing, and it completed as I expected.

Once I acknowledged the setup completion, an error about OneDrive file synchronization was thrown in my face. It claimed my upload cache had been corrupted, and wanted to replace it with a clean one. I accepted, and it opened the Upload Center, which I didn't really want. There was no close button, but right-clicking the title bar and choosing Close worked.

I then went to launch Word so I could continue editing a document I had been working on earlier. It showed the standard Office 2013 blue solid rectangle with loading dots, then crashed almost immediately without showing a main window. I tried all the Office applications, and all of them crashed similarly. A bit of poking around with Visual Studio revealed that the crash was caused by a null pointer dereference.

My next shot at getting these programs to work was via the Windows compatibility options. I fiddled with the settings and the troubleshooter, and eventually discovered that the apps sort of work if and only if they're run in compatibility mode for Windows 7. I was then able to see their main screen. It looks fairly similar to Office 2013, but with more web-like style (imagine Office Online) and non-all-caps tab names. It also crashed after letting me look at it for five seconds, but it wasn't the same fatal error dialog ("would you like to debug this program?") as before. Rather, it said something along the lines of "PowerPoint ran into an error and needs to close" and offered a "Repair" option, which didn't seem to do anything besides wait two seconds and close the program. (I did get to continue interacting with the UI while said repairing was being done.)

I did some Internet searching on the problem and discovered that having vestigial parts of old Office installations may trip up Office 2016. So I went to Programs and Features and - lo and behold - there was still an entry for Office 2013. I clicked Uninstall on it... and it said it couldn't proceed because there was a newer version of Office there.

Great.

So I uninstalled Office 2016, then uninstalled Office 2013 (leaving behind a bunch of broken shortcuts), then rebooted, and installed Office 2016 again. This time I got no OneDrive errors, but the programs still didn't work. Same crashes and error dialogs as before.

I then resignedly removed the Office 2016 installation and reinstalled Office 2013. At least that still works. I'll keep an eye on Office 2016 development, and maybe try installing the current version in a Windows 10 VM.