Forum Discussion
Microsoft Office for Mac - "Save As" dialog box does not appear
Hello,
Randomly, I get requests for support from clients that are unable to save a document in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel for mac.
When they click on "Save As", nothing happens. I will do my best to recover their work by copying the contents of their document into another application and then force quitting Word/Excel/PowerPoint in hopes that it will autorecover. Quitting/reopening the application resolves the issue 100% of the time, but is frustrating for my clients. In the past, some have lost hours of work as a result.
This issue has been happening for a year (across multiple versions of Office for Mac) and across multiple computers. I've encountered the issue on computers managed by my organizations MDM service, and computers that weren't managed by any MDM service.
Has anyone else encountered this issue? Does anyone have a fix to prevent it from happening?
Thanks!
Grant
GrantLogan You might try raising the issue in the Microsoft Answers Forum - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum? as there are more Mac users there than there are among the regulars here.
GrantLogan We are experiencing this issue as well across multiple users, OS, app versions. We have 4,500+ users on MacBooks who routinely experience these issues. So far, our solution has been the same as yours. We restart the application or device and the issue disappears for a period of time.
GrantLogan We see the same issue with our users with all of the Microsoft Apps. Have not been able to find a fix for it.
- ILS_AP I experienced the issue personally today. I've had it occur with both the Mac App Store versions and standalone versions of the apps. With today's issue, I noticed the apps were updated without technically restarting. Apps that were open during this process experienced issues. Excel and Outlook had Save As and Attachment window issues respectively.
My MDM (JAMF) shows the following updates occured.
Added Application Microsoft Excel.app 16.78.23102801
Added Application Microsoft Outlook.app 16.78.23102801
Added Application Microsoft PowerPoint.app 16.78.23102801
Deleted Application Microsoft Excel.app 16.78.23100802
Deleted Application Microsoft Outlook.app 16.78.23102103
Deleted Application Microsoft PowerPoint.app 16.78.23100802
In checking console logs, I see NSXPCSharedListenerErrorDomain errors for both apps. Both apps seem to have "Unable to display save panel" or Unable to display open panel" in the logs as well. I will keep digging, but I suspect this update while the apps are open may break some connection/function for the app. I would love to know if you see the same things.- Yes, I am seeing the same errors in the Console logs as you did. I'm on Sonoma now and it made no difference.
I can cut and past info into a new document and save as. Seems like problem has to do with saving to web storage..and microsoft should fix it.
GrantLoganI have seen similar issues to this, I can offer a slight work-around that might help (don't solve the actual issue however).
Double click on the filename at the top middle of the application window. You should then get a save dialog to one drive - the 'on my mac' button appears but doesn't work - so I save the document to a one drive temp location, close word/excel etc then reopen the document and then use the 'save a copy' option to save the document in the desired location. Its still not ideal, but I think saves messing around with copy and pasting.
Hope that's useful for you!
David.GrantLogan I have this exact same issue. Was on an Intel-MacBook, but recently switched to a new M3 one, everything new and up-to-date and this problem still persists across all O365 apps.
