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ChrisHansen-8062 avatar image
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ChrisHansen-8062 asked SuyashThomson-2554 commented

Excel won't open

Hello,

This one baffles me, I’m hoping someone can help.

I’m helping someone whose Excel application won’t open. It gives a message asking if you want to open it in Safe Mode but, whether you click yes or no, nothing happens. All the other O365 apps work fine. The funny thing is when I run it as admin or run as a different user it opens just fine.

This is in a corporate environment. I updated it to the newest version of O365 that’s available to us but it didn’t help. I also used the office scrubber to uninstall and then reinstalled it. They have updates and stuff locked down so I wasn’t able to do that part.

I was going to rebuild the user’s Windows profile next but wanted to see if there’s anything else to look at before I take that step.

Thanks.

office-excel-itpro
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SuyashThomson-2554 avatar image SuyashThomson-2554 ·

The most common reason for this problem: Excel won’t open a file because the file is corrupted. This is especially common if Excel crashes while saving the file, or if a problematic macro prevents the file from being saved correctly. When this happens, the file is often so damaged that you can no longer open it with Excel by double-clicking the file in the File Explorer.

In some cases, the solution is simple:

  1. Open a blank document in Excel.


  2. Select the File tab and click on “Open” to see a list of recently opened files. Alternatively, you can use the Excel keyboard shortcut Ctrl + O.


  3. Double-click the file you want to open.


  4. If the file still won’t open, click “Browse” and search for the file.


  5. At the bottom of the “Open” dialog box, click the small arrow next to the “Open button”, then choose “Open and Repair” from the context menu.


  6. If the files are corrupted, you will be asked whether you want to repair the file or just extract data. First, try to repair the file. If that doesn’t work, you can use the “Extract Data” option to recover data from the file or you can try to recover the Excel file.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/52908.excel-troubleshooting-unable-to-read-file-error.aspx

Best Regards,

Suyash

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2 Answers

emilyhua-msft avatar image
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emilyhua-msft answered emilyhua-msft edited

Hi @ChrisHansen-8062

According to your descriptions, I would suggest you try following steps. If those do not work either, the user profile may be corrupted, and you can create a new Windows account as you said.

  • First please right click on Excel cion, run as administrator.

  • Press Win and R to open Run dialog, enter excel /s to run Excel in safe mode.

    • If you can open Excel with safe mode, please go to Options > Add-ins > Manage COM add-ins > Go, clear the check boxes for any enabled COM add-ins, select OK.
      Locate to C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART, if there is any subfolder or file in it, please move it to other location temporarily.
      Start Excel to have a check.

    • If openning Excel with safe mode is failed, I would suggest you backup the files under this Windows account, then log in to the machine as an additional Administrator account (Account that already activated previously).
      Go to C:\Users to find this user folder that has problems opening Excel, please rename it as "<user name>.old" (Example: the user is Test and becomes Test.old), and then go to Registry Editor, locating Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and search the folder via "ProfileImagePath" for this user and delete it.
      198075-1.jpg
      (Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, please remember to back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.)
      After this procedure, you can sign out of current Administrator user and logged in again the deleted user, then please open Excel to check this issue.

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ChrisHansen-8062 answered emilyhua-msft commented

I actually found another solution and didn't have to rebuild the user's Windows profile. This came from a senior tech at the company.

I downgraded the video driver on the user's HP laptop, it seems the current version of the driver has caused this problem before. After uninstalling through device manager and checking the box for delete the file I ran the install for the older HP driver and had the user restart.

I thought this was curious, can anyone explain it? After restarting, I clicked on the Excel icon and an orange window came up which said it was updating Office. Then Excel came up and there was a note that there's a problem with the account and to sign out and sign back in again. After that it worked fine. Is this related or just coincidence?

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emilyhua-msft avatar image emilyhua-msft ·

Hi @ChrisHansen-8062

Thanks for your sharing.

According to your descriptions, it cannot be ruled out that the previous video driver caused this issue. If there is a conflict between the driver and Excel, Excel may hangs as it examines the video drivers when starting it.

When we are troubleshooting Excel performance issues, sometimes, we advised users to check the video driver like this document "Excel not responding, hangs, freezes or stops working" says.


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