Skip to main content
J
johnh943955
Participant
April 21, 2017
Question

Word and Excel for Mac 2016 don't work with Acrobat DC

  • April 21, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1422 views

I get an error message when I drag a Word or Excel doc onto the Acrobat DC icon, or when I include Office docs in a list of files to combine into a PDF binder.

I think the problem has to do with Office 2016 for Mac, not Acrobat, since this used to work fine when I had Office 2011 for Mac.

In fact, I still have the Office 2011 programs installed while I'm testing out Office 2016 for Mac, so I'm wondering if there's any way to tell the PDFmaker plugin to launch Word 2011 instead of Word 2016 (without completely uninstalling Office 2016).

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

J
johnh943955Author
Participant
May 19, 2017

Hi Tariq,

I'll lead with the good news: yes, I have found a working solution for this.

My current workaround is pretty simple, and I recommend it to others with this problem: I have completely stopped using the Acrobat Pro DC desktop app to combine Word documents into PDFs.

Instead, I just use the online tool at cloud.acrobat.com/combinepdf.

To answer the other questions you asked:

No, I haven't tried phone or chat, but I'll try that if I can find the time.

Yes, I do have both Word 2011 and Word 2016 installed, and I will need to keep it that way for the foreseeable future because there are still features in 2011 missing from 2016 that I need to access.

You make a good suggestion to uninstall on of the two versions temporarily to see if that resolves the issue, but even if it did work, it wouldn't be viable as a solution for me so I haven't bothered taking time to try that.

A simple preferences setting somewhere in Acrobat Pro to set/specify the path for the helper application Acrobat uses to open Word docs prior to conversion would fix this, in my opinion, but that doesn't appear to be something users can adjust.

T
Community Manager
Tariq AhmadCommunity Manager
Community Manager
May 22, 2017

Thank you for your response and I understand your concern here.

I still suspect there are a good number of chances that having the dual version of Microsoft Office might be causing this issue. Since we share registry entries with a version of Microsoft Office to leverage on a certain feature and in this case both the versions are compatible with the version of Acrobat you are using.

About the last part of having a preference, I would request you may bring that to notice to the product team directly via this link: Feature Request/Bug Report Form with your comments and workflow.

-Tariq Dar.

T
Community Manager
Tariq AhmadCommunity Manager
Community Manager
May 16, 2017

Hi johnh943955,

Sorry for the delay in response.

Have you tried to contact our chat or phone support for this issue?

Do you have both 2011 and 2016 Microsoft office versions installed on your machine? Have you tried to uninstall one restart your machine and then tried again, if not i would suggesting give try.

If you already have found a resolution to this issue. I would request respond with the resolution that will help others.

-Tariq Dar.

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices