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I frequently have a problem with Excel 2016 (Office 365). Without apparent cause, most of the GUI freezes. I.e.:
Saving all files and closing all Excel windows and restarting Excel solves the problem.
I work with Excel a lot and the problem occurs approximately once a day.
Any input is welcome. I don't even know what to search for to see if others have the same problem. I also don't know if it is a problem with one of the workbooks that I'm working on, if it is an Excel problem or even a Win 10 problem (I also have the issues with the graphics driver crashing all the time that so many other Win 10 users have). I installed Office 2016 after doing a clean install of Win 10.
I'm running this on a Surface Pro 3 (256GB, i5). UPDATE (April 28, 2016): Just got a new Surface Pro 4 (256GB, i7) and started from a clean slate - still the same problem...
UPDATE (April 2016)
I found another work-around:
Hi, thank you for that suggestion! I have been using Excel without hardware graphics acceleration for a few weeks now and the problem is mostly solved. I have not had the complete GUI freeze anymore (see suggestion further down in this forum). So this is a good work-around.
The only thing I notice now, is that the interface around the box that shows the formula in a selected cell is often not showing up properly. For example, the "insert function" button or the buttons next to it do not show up properly.
UPDATE (Feb 1, 2016)
I found a work around:
I am 100% certain by now that this is a problem relating to the display driver. Something gets set wrong in the display driver (sorry if my language is technically not 100% correct, I'm not a software engineer). So I figured if I get the display driver to reload or at least update some basic parameters of my display, Excel should be displayed normally again.
My first attempt was to disable the display driver. Windows complained a bit but, sure enough, it did the trick. My next step was to change the display resolution (just to revert the changes right away). Worked again.
The simplest trick for me is to turn off my external display and turn it on again.
It's not ideal but not the worst solution either. And hopefully at some point Microsoft will fix the issue.
UPDATE (Jan 11, 2016):
I have an UPDATE to my first post:
Another major issue I have been dealing with since I upgraded to Win10 and Office 2016 is that my display / graphics card driver has been crashing frequently (I'm using a Surface Pro 3).
A couple of days ago Excel acted up on me again and I was about to close out everything and restart Excel. Just then, I got a notification that display driver has crashed and has recovered AND right when the notification came up, Excel's GUI returned to normal. Everything worked again. It is hard for me to pin down the causation but I'm certain now that the two are related. I have Excel open 99% of the time. So it's hard for me to tell if Excel is causing trouble with the graphics card driver or the other way around. In fact, I can't say for sure whether Excel is the only (Office) program that has this problem. It just happens to be the one I work with A LOT.
I also think I can rule out a specific spreadsheet as being the cause of the problem. I have had the problem with a couple of spreadsheets now.
Seems like the Microsoft moderators quickly ran out of ideas. Does anyone else have some ideas what the problem/solution might be?
A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I also experience this freezing in Word 2016.
My workaround there is double-clicking on the contents of an inserted text box.
Upon clicking outside, everything goes back to normal.
The Excel problem, which shows how limited Microsoft's abilities are, is the biggest headache.
I have the same issue but I'm unconvinced it is a display driver issue - if that were the case, then everyone with the problem would be using the same video card type - however I have seen the issue reported on Radeon cards, nVidia cards as well as the more common Intel cards (which I have) - so if it is a driver issue, every one of the three video card manufacturers' drivers has the same bug!!
It is more likely an issue in Excel 2016's direct-interface to hardware acceleration (one of the DirectXXX APIs) being utterly broken - especially if disabling Excel's use of the hardware acceleration fixes the issue.
I've now disabled hardware accelearation - hopefully this fixes it.
I have found that changing to a different sheet and then changing back fixes it ....but I hope this problem is addressed as patch soon.
Not 100% if this works for all cases, but we found the display issues were caused from clipboard usage (vba and user initiated). We suspect there's a memory leak in the excel clipboard since 2013.
We have fixed this issue by switching from the windows clipboard to the office clipboard. Here are the steps to do this:
Interesting fix above with the clipboard solution...
This was a BIG problem for a few of our VIP users - it would generally only happen when they had 5+ instances of Excel open at a time, but when it would happen, it had identical symptoms as described by the OP. Clicking on cells would produce no response, text on menu items/buttons would disappear, and for us the telltale sign was that if the user went to the File tab on the ribbon, the file screen would become all distorted w/ green/yellow graphics (the Excel color theme) and you could see the outlines of the buttons but couldn't see the text on them, etc.
After testing all sorts of different possible fixes (including disabling hardware graphics acceleration in Excel) as well as opening a paid support case w/ MS, the solution for us was to (permanently) disable the Intel Graphics Control Panel Service (could be done via services.msc or msconfig). It appears that in our case, some sort of incompatibility between Intel's driver (and yes we tried several different versions) and Excel 2016 was causing the issue. This fix has worked for every one of our users that was having the problem, each of whom were previously having it multiple times daily.
I can't comment on the issue happening w/ different graphics cards because all of my users that have had the issue so far were running laptops using the onboard Intel graphics. I did notice when trying to reproduce the issue that it was more likely to happen on laptops than desktops, more likely to happen when docking/undocking multiple times in a row, and more likely to happen when the machine had just awoken from sleep or hibernate.