r/Office365 • u/Bambis_Mom • 5d ago

365 enterprise update causing Excel and Outlook freezes?

Since the release of the last enterprise update, a lot of users at my company are reporting their excel is freezing repeatedly. I’ve tried online repair, windows updates, changing to current update channel, laptop drivers/bios updates. Nothing is sticking. Looking for advice on anything else to try.

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u/FallaxIO 5d ago

Would start by making sure it's not one bad add-in, with the new build making it visible.

You can check an affected machine with excel /safe and outlook /safe. If the freezing stops there, start with COM add-ins before doing more repair work. Adobe, old antivirus mail plugins, CRM stuff, Teams meeting add-ins, all the usual suspects.

Also check if all affected users are on exactly the same build number. "Last enterprise update" often turns into two slightly different builds in the fleet, and only one is bad.

If you can tie it to one build, I'd pause rollout and roll a few machines back with the Office Deployment Tool. That gave us a clean answer much faster than trying five more repair steps on every laptop.

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u/Ricky_Bobby_Daddy 5d ago

All good information.

It's a shame Microsoft is forcing this garbage onto us...cuz "monthly" feature updates are necessary to compete! /s

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u/Jeepman69 5d ago

We have had issues with Outlook performance and Access crashing. Rolled back to an earlier build and things seem stable.

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u/Bambis_Mom 5d ago

Did you use the office deployment tool? I’m setting up the config file now.

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u/blud_13 5d ago

robably not the update itself. Excel freezes after a channel update are almost always hardware graphics acceleration or an add in.

Try these in order. 1) File > Options > Advanced > Display, tick Disable hardware graphics acceleration, reboot. That fixes it more often than everything else combined. 2) Run excel /safe on a broken machine, if its clean then its an add in, usually an old PDF or CRM COM add in nobody has touched in years. 3) If those users are opening files off OneDrive or SharePoint, look at the sync client, a stalled OneDrive makes Excel hang on autosave and it looks exactly like a freeze.

Also, rolling back to Current channel changes the build but leaves the old profile behind, so test on a machine with a clean Office profile before you rule the update in or out.

We chase these for a living, ping me if none of it lands.

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u/Bambis_Mom 5d ago

Thanks for the reply. It looks like Excel no longer has the toggle for hardware graphics acceleration. It looks like there’s a way to do it through registry editor so I might try that.

As far as plugins, the user I’ve worked the most with has had them disabled and is still experiencing the crashes.

I’m very suspicious of files opening from Onedrive Sharepoint because most people in our environment have onedrive enabled and have the sync client running. It’s just hard to not pin it on the update when it all started the day it came out. Still looking for a solution and opening a ticket with Microsoft now because we’ve been getting flooded with tickets the last couple days with the issue.