Excel freezing
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I have a user on a brand new workstation class PC, 16 GB RAM 256 NVMe SSD.
When she accesses Excel files from the network or locally - it's not uncommon for excel to lockup/freeze. Excel never actually says - "Excel is not responding" as often happens when an application hangs. I can alt tab to other non-Excel programs - but they often won't come over the top of the frozen Excel windows.
This issue has plagued this user off and on over three different computers.
Today I disabled offline files on this latest computer, once the reboot happens tomorrow I'll be watching it to see if there is any change.
Other troubleshooting thoughts?
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@Dashrender What version of Excel? Disabling Excel Graphics Hardware Acceleration on Excel 2013 through to 2019, can resolve display, stability and performance issues. (edited this for terrible grammar!)
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What version of Excel?
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Second on the hardware acceleration disabling, fixed some weird Word and Excel display issues we had
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Office 2016.... OK I'll disable that tomorrow.
Thanks!
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Any luck/update?
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The change was made to Excel this morning - but the user has been working other tasks since then... so no - no update.
That said - over the past week, the user has been informing me of many issues, so if they continue, I should hear about it quickly.
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@Dashrender Make sure your using the 64 bit version instead of the 32 bit. They had me installing the 32 bit version here when I first started and I saw issues like what your describing.
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@jmoore said in Excel freezing:
@Dashrender Make sure your using the 64 bit version instead of the 32 bit. They had me installing the 32 bit version here when I first started and I saw issues like what your describing.
I switched to installing the 64 Bit version about 6 months ago.
This user's computer is about 3 months old, so they should be on 64 bit... but I'll double check.
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Excel... check the specific spreadsheet(s) workbook(s) that they're having problems with.... we've had a few cases where people are causing problems with data references and other wonderful things that they find when googling for a solution. Like statically referencing another file on their desktop or personal share and then sending the file to someone else only to find that it doesn't work for the other person.
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This is more than a little random, but I've had drivers for HP printers cause issues with Excel after the computer was updated to W10 1903 this week. Fix is simple, remove the PCL6 driver and install the universal print driver.
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Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.
Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.
Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).
Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.
On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.
Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.
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@bbigford said in Excel freezing:
Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.
Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.
Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).
Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.
On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.
Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.
Decent list of options
- user is on 64 bit - I made the switch for my images about the time MS made the recommendation change
- hardware acceleration is disabled, but only after reported issues
- there are zero Office add-ons
- good idea - I'll run a memtest tonight. This is a 6 month old workstation class HP machine, though it does not have ECC RAM.
- could be failing drive - but this user has been having issues for years over 4+ different machines, seems unlikely.
- The files do all live on the network - a Windows 2012 R2 server. Most if not all of the excel files do not reference other worksheets.
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@Dashrender said in Excel freezing:
@bbigford said in Excel freezing:
Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.
Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.
Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).
Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.
On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.
Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.
Decent list of options
- user is on 64 bit - I made the switch for my images about the time MS made the recommendation change
- hardware acceleration is disabled, but only after reported issues
- there are zero Office add-ons
- good idea - I'll run a memtest tonight. This is a 6 month old workstation class HP machine, though it does not have ECC RAM.
- could be failing drive - but this user has been having issues for years over 4+ different machines, seems unlikely.
- The files do all live on the network - a Windows 2012 R2 server. Most if not all of the excel files do not reference other worksheets.
Ah, you'll waste your time on memtest. I didn't realize it was happening on 4 different workstations. It's not the workstation.
I've also had this be a permissions issue. I had one weird incident where a file had share and NTFS permissions all over the place. It was basically recalculating the perms while they worked, because I changed shared to FC everyone and gave the person most access to the folder and the issue went away.
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@bbigford said in Excel freezing:
@Dashrender said in Excel freezing:
@bbigford said in Excel freezing:
Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.
Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.
Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).
Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.
On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.
Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.
Decent list of options
- user is on 64 bit - I made the switch for my images about the time MS made the recommendation change
- hardware acceleration is disabled, but only after reported issues
- there are zero Office add-ons
- good idea - I'll run a memtest tonight. This is a 6 month old workstation class HP machine, though it does not have ECC RAM.
- could be failing drive - but this user has been having issues for years over 4+ different machines, seems unlikely.
- The files do all live on the network - a Windows 2012 R2 server. Most if not all of the excel files do not reference other worksheets.
Ah, you'll waste your time on memtest. I didn't realize it was happening on 4 different workstations. It's not the workstation.
I've also had this be a permissions issue. I had one weird incident where a file had share and NTFS permissions all over the place. It was basically recalculating the perms while they worked, because I changed shared to FC everyone and gave the person most access to the folder and the issue went away.
Most of these xls files are in the user's Document directory, no permissions have been changed.
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Another thing to check is the printer settings on the affected workstation. I've seen the SNMP settings, even though they are correct, needed to be disabled. Blips in the network have caused those connections trying to be re-established and cause frustrating pauses. Clicking on anything in Excel causes it to freeze and crash, but not always.
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@scotth said in Excel freezing:
Another thing to check is the printer settings on the affected workstation. I've seen the SNMP settings, even though they are correct, needed to be disabled. Blips in the network have caused those connections trying to be re-established and cause frustrating pauses. Clicking on anything in Excel causes it to freeze and crash, but not always.
Interesting - I'll give that a try!
Thanks
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@Dashrender said in Excel freezing:
@scotth said in Excel freezing:
Another thing to check is the printer settings on the affected workstation. I've seen the SNMP settings, even though they are correct, needed to be disabled. Blips in the network have caused those connections trying to be re-established and cause frustrating pauses. Clicking on anything in Excel causes it to freeze and crash, but not always.
Interesting - I'll give that a try!
Thanks
I've also seen a problem that if their default printer is unavailable for any reason, this will cause it to freeze a lot.
Set the default printer to Microsoft PDF or what-not, and the problem goes away -- the down side is that they have to choose the printer anytime they actually do want to print.
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So the ongoing saga that is this user.
This morning - the PC had been up for 4 days (which really shouldn't be an issue) when using Excel - sheets were left open over the weekend for sure! - the search function on the open screen would not allow them to click into the search box. It just sat there dumb... you could close it, but nothing else. When you clicked, literally nothing happened.
Rebooting 'fixed' the issue.
The computer has 16 GB RAM and 256 GB NMVe SSD.
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Is this a local install or a Click-to-Run version? Might there be something odd going on with OneDrive integration (assuming O365).
