So I ran into this weird problem recently where after downgrading the version of office to 1810 from 2001 for the users, if the user tries to open a file on a shared drive it would crash and close automatically.
If the exact same file is copied to a local drive, the file can be opened and accessed without any issues at all. But, while accessing the same file on the shared drive, the office was crashing.
This was happening for all the office applications. E.g Microsoft Word,
Excel, Powerpoint etc.
Things I Tired To Fix The Office Apps Crashing Issue
Like anyone else, the first thing I tried to do is to update the office version again. Even though I had just downgraded the office, I tried to update and see if it was an issue with the version of office the remote file was saved in and the version of Office that the system was on.
Without any luck, I still faced the same issue.
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After that I tried to repair the office application from the control panel.
Did it help? NO.
After trying almost everything, the way I got this working was by deleting the Application data for Microsoft office.
So, if your office application is crashing after an update/downgrade you can try this if you have tried other ways to fix this issue.
Office Crashing: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access Automatically shutting down
I have done the same for all of our users and this has not created any issues yet.
No one has complained about data loss or major change in their office application settings or configurations.
So, I would say it is safe to delete the application data :D. Also if you do not have anything else working, this would be your last hope before recreating a new user profile right?
You should have administrator rights if your doing this on a work computer and the same for a work computer. ( But I assume you already have admin rights since you are doing this on your personal computer)
- Go to C:/
- Open Users
- Find the user that is having issue or the name of the user account that is having issue
- Do you see the folder “AppData”? If not, make sure you have enabled hidden items to see the “AppData” folder
- Go to the exact path AppData>Roaming>Microsoft
- You will find the folders “Office”, “Excel”, “Powerpoint”, rename the folder and add a “.old” to the name of the folder
- Allow admin access if it asks for approval
- Now sign out of your user account and sign back in
- Try opening the file that was crashing the office, the file will open without any issues
Finally, this will only work if this is not a issue with the version of the office that is installed and the version of office that the file was created or recently saved on.
Hope this helped you fix your automatically crashing office application on windows PC.
