Missing Print Options in Office and PowerPoint 2011

For about a year now I have not been able to print handouts in Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 (14.3.9). The option is simply not in the print dialog box. I finally discovered that this is due to using a case-sensitive file system. What I see is the following:

PowerPoint print dialog on a case-senstitive file system

I can use the Layout options to accomplish a similar effect, but I can't print handouts with notes, etc. It turns out that this problem affects all of Office (Word and Excel as well).

What I should see is

PowerPoint print dialog on a case-insensitive file system

Other than reformatting my hard drive as case-insensitive and restoring from my Time Machine backup, is there any way to correct this behavior?

EDIT: Please note that in the first dialog, Apple's default "Copies" and "Pages" options are displayed above the pop-up menu. In Microsoft's print dialog extension (second image above) Word, Excel, and PowerPoint present their own "Copies" and "Slides" and "Print What" (etc.) options under the "Copies & Pages" pop-up. There simply is no "Copies & Pages" option when running on a case sensitive file system, so there is no way to print handouts, speaker notes, etc. Case sensitivity apparently causes the Office print dialog extension to fail to load.

I've used otool to dig through the dynamic libraries and frameworks involved, looking for a possible case mis-match, but so far have come up empty.

EDIT 2: There simply is no "Copies & Pages" option in the popup dialog on a case-sensitive file system, I've attached a third image that shows the options available to me:

enter image description here

It is simply not there. As stated in the previous edit, they are above the pop-up menu. In fact, PowerPoint ignores the settings there, since it is expecting the options from the custom plugin Office provide. So I can ONLY print a single copy of a full document, unless I jump into Preview first.


Solution 1:

I just solved this on my own machine. Very frustrating.

The issue is that the missing section of the print dialog is a "Print Dialog Extension" (PDE). This is loaded from the individual Office apps' plugin directories. The issue is that Office is coded to look for a "PlugIns" directory whereas the directory is actually named "Plugins".

I suggest using a symbolic link to fix this. Presuming you have a default installation of Office then open Terminal, and execute:

cd "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft PowerPoint.app/Contents/"
ln -s Plugins PlugIns

Relaunch Powerpoint and bask in the delicious print dialog extensions. BTW, you will need to do something similar for the other Office apps.

NOTE: I advise against simply renaming the Plugins directory to PlugIns. It might break something else.