Word 2011 Mac - Most of ribbon and menu greyed out

On Macs, it is important to keep the OS up-to-date with all patches. If multiple updates are required, restarting between updates is important. After applying any updates it's also very important to run the Disk Utility program (located in Applications/Utilities folder). Use it to Repair Permissions on the Macintosh HD drive and reboot after running the utility.

Assuming there is a problem with the Normal template:
• Open Finder and from its Menu Bar choose Go
• Click the "Go to folder" item and paste in this: ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates
• Rename the Normal.dotm template to oldNormal.dotm
• Open Word and see if that corrects the problem

Office crashes on Macs are often caused by font conflicts. Such crashes may be indicated by a line like ‘Crashed Module Name: libTrueTypeScaler.dylib’ in the crash log. Go to the Applications folder and run the FontBook app (located in Applications/Utilities folder) to resolve any duplicates. FontBook Help can guide you through the process. If you do find any duplicates you must restart your system after resolving them. If font-related problems persist, you may have a damaged font file – FontBook won’t tell you if a font file is damaged. To isolate a damaged font, create a folder, then:
1. Move about half of the fonts there by families (and it's better to restart);
2. If the problem persists, it lies in one of the active fonts; if not, swap the fonts between the active folder and those in the isolation folder;
3. Colour the fonts in the isolation folder with green; and
4. Repeat from step 1
In this way, you'll be testing about 1/2 of the fonts, then 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, etc., thus working through all the fonts in a few iterations. It's possible that you will still get an error after this, in which case you either have more than one corrupt font, or the problem lies elsewhere.

Another cause of Office crashes on Macs is putting Office in any other folder other than Macintosh HD/Applications/Microsoft Office [Version]. If you've put it anywhere else or renamed the folder, that will cause issues.

For repair/reinstallation procedures, see:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/RemoveReinstall.html
http://www.office.mvps.org/install/r...ffice2011.html
For Office 2011 un-installation, see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2398768
After reinstalling, allow the AutoUpdate utility to update Office to the current update (see above).