OSX High Sierra + Office 2016 + NextCloud 12 = Death

I’m seeing a very strange behaviour with NextCloud these days…

When attempting to open a synced Office document (word, excel, powerpoint) in a NextCloud (12.x) with OSX Desktop Client 2.3.2. The application will crash. (either hang or hard crash). BUT if I move the application off to any other directory that is NOT synced with NextCloud, it opens fine with no crashes.

I can open the document in say pages or any other editor and it works without crashing.

This problem seems to have manifested since upgrading to High Sierra (when running on Sierra, it was fine)… so I think the desktop client is doing something that office doesn’t like and breaking it.

Could be a combination of locks and the new APFS filesystem. But I think you nailed it on the head when you said High Sierra, I hear it’s problematic right now

Well, what’s weird is if I move the file out of the NextCloud folder path and then open it up, everything acts normal. (example, I open a 39KB file in the nextcloud controlled path and it Word and Excel crash or won’t open the document… but if I copy the file to the desktop or to another path NOT under the nextcloud path) and then open it… excel and word open it perfectly.

Even if I end the NextCloud Client (i.e.: its not running) anything that I open in folder path with office seems to break… which makes me wonder if we set some incompatible permissions or other metadata attributes for those folders.

I checked the permissions for the files inside and out and its exactly the same… I did a metadata clean on both and it still acts the same… so its weird.

I will try re-installing the nextcloud application to see if that has any positive impact.

This is interesting, @nickvergessen @MorrisJobke @blizzz any ideas?
I guess this needs an issue raised on the OC client repo?

https://github.com/nextcloud/client/ cough

You’ve finally forked the whole thing? :heart:

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To catch everyone up… it looks like this is a quirk of office 2016 (latest patches), High Sierra, and Next Cloud…

When I downgrade to Office 2016 15.6 (OSX), then the problem goes away… so its very odd… not sure what they broke in some of the versions beyond 15.6.

We have seen some issues with High Sierra and Microsoft Office 2016 that have not been reproducible but it has lowered confidence in NextCloud. I look forward to learning more…