Microsoft Office 2011 14.5.6
Microsoft has issued version 14.5.6 of its Office 2011 suite to correct an Exchange syncing issue that bedeviled users who had migrated to OS X 10.11 El Capitan. In particular, a bug with Outlook caused unending hangs, making it impossible to download new email when running El Capitan. While Office 2011 has received a fix, Office 2016 users are still awaiting relief (and are being vocal about it in this Microsoft Community thread) from repeated crashes suffered not just by Outlook but also by Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint (as noted by this Computerworld article). (Free update from the Microsoft Download Center or through Microsoft AutoUpdate, 113 MB, release notes, 10.5.8+)
So if I understand this correctly, I should now be able to run Office 2011 on El Capitan. This is one of the things holding up my upgrade.
it sounds like it. I bit the bullet and installed office 2016 which seems a lot more bloated size-wise (all apps contain all the fonts in their own folder, as an example of the MS stupidity...), I might downgrade to 2011 if this fix works.