Alt+Enter With Office 2010 (64bit) freezes

I'm pretty sure ALT-ENTER is not a valid shortcut in Office 2010.
Maybe that key combination has been assigned to a macro?

In my installation the line feed combo in word is shift-enter but alt-enter in excel - I'm pretty sure they used to be consistent! -  and on investigation I found that word had a customised mapping changing it (alt+enter) to edit/redo and I've not yet found out how to change it back

you can check keyboard mapping under 'customise ribbon', 'customise keyboard shortcuts'.

I'm guessing its a mapping for different keyboard layouts; these are the official shortcuts for US layout:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Keyboard-shortcuts-for-Microsoft-Word-9a2e0234-e682-49ff-a4aa-999f07b51bf3#bm5

whatever the reason there shouldn't be a crash so go into the customise keyboard dialog and in the 'new shortcut key' press alt-enter this will show what its currently assigned to and might point to where the problem lies

Also worth disabling any add-ins - especially Bluetooth - and seeing if that improves the crashing if not the user re-training!

thanks for your responses
I will try to repair the Office tonight and see if the result is any better
else I guess that I'll have to uninstall and reinstall the pack

i dont think that will help but the customisations are stored in the template so make sure you remove that when uninstalling or they will remain.

looking further I've found that shift+enter is not a key mapping that you can change and insert line feed is not offered as a command either so you may find that this is by design and can't be changed. I've switched to 2016 at my other office and will check if that's the same later today

I have tested Alt+enter on other machines running Office 2010 and they don't lock up

With Excel you get a line feed while typing in cell, and with Word you apprently duplicate  the text you just typed

yes in the later version of word the alt+enter seems to be mapped to editRepeatRedo - same as ctrl-y.

on the installation that breaks have you looked at the 'customise keyboard shortcuts' to see what alt-enter points at?

however this shouldn't be causing any problems in Excel because the key mapping isn't implemented there.

which keyboard layout do you have installed

Ok so last night I uninstalled the Office
removed folder Office entry from the Microsoft software registry section (HKLM & HKLU)
I ran Ccleaner, rebooted
Then I reinstalled Office
Alt+Enter stills locks up

I replaced the french keyboard layout with a UK
rebooted : Alt+Enter stills locks up

Launched Powerpoint and tested  Alt+Enter : doesn't lock up

In word:
go to backstage, options, customise ribbon,keyboard shortcuts [ customise], click on the 'press new shortcut key field' and press alt-enter - does this hang?

if not then on the lower left you should see what alt-enter is triggering (if anything) - what is shown?

Try re-assigning alt-enter to some other command and see if it still causes issues.

If none of this works then we should consider the possibility that its a keyboard/driver compatibility problem and only manifesting in word / excel for some obscure reason

In the meantime I think the users will have to get used to using shift+enter in Word and Alt+enter in excel because I can't see a way to remap them

Alt+Enter in Excel locks Excel up aswell

yes, sorry, I was thinking of something else.

given what we have uncovered so far I think it unlikely this is purely a word/excel problem, did you find out if the key has been mapped to something else?

the next stage would be to try with a different keyboard - from a machine that doesn't show the behaviour so we can exclude the keyboard hardware

I haven't checked the key mappings, but the user's first attempt was to swap keyboards with another user
I beginning to get the feeling that this might be a Windows issue rather than an Office problem

Was the swap keyboard a different make and model?

I agree its looking unlikely to be office however its worth trying some other things:
- if this is a laptop on a dock does the behaviour change if you switch between docked/un docked
- if this is a 64bit office try installing the 32bit and vice versa
- Is there anything in the event logs after a crash which indicates what broke


- please confirm you've disabled all add-ons especially Bluetotth

Thanks Reg
I called the user about the keayboard : different brands => DELL/Heden

The user gave me an additional indication though : the Alt+TAB freezes the app in focus and doesn't switch to the next app
So the issue is definately a Windows (or keyboard controller) issue

I updated the graphics drivers: np improvement
Disbaled Aero: no improvement
I uninstalled unecessary utilities : Alt+Enter is working properly again

glad you got it resolved, if you can figure out which utility was causing it please post a follow up here for others who might use it