How do I remove Office 2008 from OS X when the "Remove Office" tool says no version of office are installed?

Question

I have Office 2008 for OS X through Microsoft's HUP (Home Use Program). I want to reinstall, so I need to first remove it.

For Office on OS X, Microsoft provides a binary called "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Additional Tools/Remove Office/Remove Office". When I run it, it says it can't find any versions of office on my computer and won't do anything.

I know MS-Office for Mac puts many different components in various places all over the system and not just within it's own applications folder, so how to I successfully remove Office so I can re-install?

Solution

Basically, without trying to fix Office Uninstaller nor using any other Microsoft tools, you can search your any files containing the name office or microsoft :

find / -iname '*office*' -or -iname '*microsoft*' >> ~/Desktop/2008.txt

You can easily find the result in ~/Desktop/2008.txt.

And then delete files referring to Office 2008.

EDIT :

I've just downloaded Office 2008 Trial and the installer is a .mpkg, so you can use tools like Pacifist or Suspicious Package to check what is installed with Microsoft Office.

Comments

[kbyrd]

Are there any other settings (similar to a Windows registry or the contents of an /etc/* file in Unix/Linux) that this wouldn't catch? I'm worried about the contents of global files, not just files MS put down.

[Studer]

The find command will only catches files based on their names. If Microsoft is clever enough (which I doubt) to create files or folder without Microsoft or Office, find won't find them. That's because I added another solutions.

[kbyrd]

Nice tip on the mpkg viewers. That solved my problem exactly.