Excel 2013 starts up with blank screen when opened from explorer

After being stuck with this problem for well over a year, I have figured out that the problem may very well lie in a hidden PERSONAL.XLSB workbook.

I followed the "clean XLSTART" folder solution called out several times before in this thread and was able to solve the issue.

I believe that what Excel is trying to do when opening the Blank Excel Window is to try opening a hidden PERSONAL.XLSB workbook. If you go to "View --> Unhide" you will find the PERSONAL.XLSB file becoming unhidden.

By moving the PERSONAL.XLSB folder to some place else and cleaning up the XLSTART folder, the problem is now fixed.

I wanted to weigh in, because I was having a similar issue that led me to this thread, but I believe what various people are describing are symptoms related to different issues. In my case, after updating to Office 2013 on a Windows 7 machine, I was (intermittently, but almost always) getting the workbook I was double-clicking on from Explorer, in addition to a blank workbook. What seems to have remedied the issue was this:

Under Office 2010, I had a single saved Macro in a hidden PERSONAL.XLSB workbook. I unhid the workbook in order to delete the Macro, thinking it'd been corrupted somehow in the transition. Same issue. I navigated to the hidden workbook's location and moved it to the desktop. Issue resolved. As I've spent now 3-4 hours on this, trying all the various things suggested in this thread, I'm going to get to work. At a later time, I'll troubleshoot re-creating the Macro (since I use it every workday) in a new hidden workbook. I just wanted to contribute a little bit in case someone encounters the same issues as me and sees this comment embedded on page 5+ :)

I have figured out that if you have the sidebar preview open in window's explorer, viewing files on a HD, and select an excel file to preview it before opening, that is when the "blank excel program" opens.  I close the sidebar preview function in windows and select the same excel file and the blank program doesn't open.

Same for everyone else?

Thanks so much, this helped!

This is a disaster. Spent nearly 2 days trying to get to the bottom of this, following forums, Microsoft articles,  updating drivers/software and repair installs of Office 2013.  Have this issue on 2 brand new PCs with Office 2013 installed.

Like others if I turn off the preview pane in explorer the files will open, but when they files are on your desktop I still have the same issue.  If I minimise and resize the window I can see the file.

I followed this document http://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/kb/2994633 but nothing worked and at the end it says to contact Microsoft who say they want to charge you to fix the issue.

Vijay's suggestion of creating a new profile works but it is not an ideal solution as my profiles have virtual machines, which can be messy to transfer between profiles.

I hope Microsoft release some sort of fix for this.

Method 1 : worked for me well , Thanks :)