Preview of Office files produces errors in Windows 10
I run Office 2013 under Windows 10 Home. Recently I have been experiencing error messages from Word and Excel when opening files.
If you double-click a document, Word produces the error "Sorry something went wrong and Word was unable to start (24)" - but then it starts anyway if you click OK. Excel shows a tiny little window with just a red X and an OK button. After clicking OK it opens the spreadsheet and works fine. And, PowerPoint says "There's not enough memory or system resources to start PowerPoint". It sometimes opens the document after clicking OK, other times you need to retry, and sometimes it just opens the document normally, with the error in a background window.
I have discovered that all of these are caused by enabling the Preview Pane in File Explorer (aka Windows Explorer in Win10). Turning off the Preview Pane makes all the files open as expected. If Preview Pane is enabled, File Explorer has other problems as well. The above errors show up if you just single-click a Office file, i.e. when the preview is supposed to show. It also seems to hang (or is extremely slow) after you single-click an Office file.
I found a solution for this problem under Win7, which involves deleting some registry keys. Unfortunately these keys do not exist on my PC. I have also tried an Office repair but that made no difference.
Does anyone know how to fix it under Win10?
If you double-click a document, Word produces the error "Sorry something went wrong and Word was unable to start (24)" - but then it starts anyway if you click OK. Excel shows a tiny little window with just a red X and an OK button. After clicking OK it opens the spreadsheet and works fine. And, PowerPoint says "There's not enough memory or system resources to start PowerPoint". It sometimes opens the document after clicking OK, other times you need to retry, and sometimes it just opens the document normally, with the error in a background window.
I have discovered that all of these are caused by enabling the Preview Pane in File Explorer (aka Windows Explorer in Win10). Turning off the Preview Pane makes all the files open as expected. If Preview Pane is enabled, File Explorer has other problems as well. The above errors show up if you just single-click a Office file, i.e. when the preview is supposed to show. It also seems to hang (or is extremely slow) after you single-click an Office file.
I found a solution for this problem under Win7, which involves deleting some registry keys. Unfortunately these keys do not exist on my PC. I have also tried an Office repair but that made no difference.
Does anyone know how to fix it under Win10?
ASKER
@Sajid sfc did not find any problems
@Jayesh I'm thinking about reinstalling Office day after tomorrow - unless someone else has a better solution.
@Jayesh I'm thinking about reinstalling Office day after tomorrow - unless someone else has a better solution.
ASKER
I have uninstalled Office and reinstalled from the DVD. No change in behaviour.
Before that I tried an "online repair" from Control Panel. According to the blurb that "fixes everything". M$, I have news for you: it doesn't.
And the Office installer just rebooted the PC without any warning. At least I think it was Office. Nothing else had changed when a message popped up for about half a second saying "reboot required". Before I could even reach for the mouse, the PC was restarting. And that happened in the middle of typing this comment...
I have "sort of" fixed it for now by deleting (exporting) the registry key HKLM\software\microsoft\wi
I thought of removing only the key for DOCX but, looking through the list I found another oddity: there are no keys for DOCX or XLSX, but there are for PPTX and TXT. What gives?
Anyone have any other suggestions? From my searches the best M$ can come up with is that they're aware of the problem.
Before that I tried an "online repair" from Control Panel. According to the blurb that "fixes everything". M$, I have news for you: it doesn't.
And the Office installer just rebooted the PC without any warning. At least I think it was Office. Nothing else had changed when a message popped up for about half a second saying "reboot required". Before I could even reach for the mouse, the PC was restarting. And that happened in the middle of typing this comment...
I have "sort of" fixed it for now by deleting (exporting) the registry key HKLM\software\microsoft\wi
I thought of removing only the key for DOCX but, looking through the list I found another oddity: there are no keys for DOCX or XLSX, but there are for PPTX and TXT. What gives?
Anyone have any other suggestions? From my searches the best M$ can come up with is that they're aware of the problem.
ASKER
Update: XLSX preview is failing again, so I'm back where I started: I can get previews for any supported file, as long as it's not an M$ Office file.
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@McKnife
I've tried logging in as another user that had been created and never used (so it should be clean), but the same problem happens. Hence it appears it may be Win10 that's stuffed - but sfc does not find any problem.
I used the easy fix tool from the link you gave to uninstall. First I noticed that the name of the utility is o15-ctrremove.diagcab (i.e. presumably for Office 15). That is after I clicked on Office 13 as my version. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I've always loved M$ support :-(
Anyway, I persevered. The easy fix tool did try to uninstall, after first saying there was a problem uninstalling. And, after it said it finished uninstalling, it brought up a Window stating that the problem found (and fixed) was that Office could not be found. Remember of this for my next steps. I assume they have practical jokers at M$.
The joke got better. After rebooting, a clean install of Office failed because "we found a pre-release or beta version of an Office product on your computer". Control Panel still lists Office 2013, and an uninstall from there now says "Something went wrong. Sorry we ran into a problem". If I now double-click the Word or Excel icons, nothing happens: no error message, and no application running. The same happens when I double-click Office documents (which still have the correct icons)
So I tried the manual install from the same link, and found that uninstall of the MSIs failed because "this action is only valid for products that are currently installed". And I did notice that the MSIs are for Office 15, which is not what I have - but it is the number in name of the "easy" fix tool.
Looks as if M$ stuffed up big time.
Next I went through the registry and Program Files and deleted everything I could find that mentioned Office. The installer now runs further. I'll keep looking for Office files and registry keys and see if I can sort this out.
I do have an image backup, and I may have to use that, but I'm not sure if it dates from before my preview problems started. At least, at the time of the backup, Office was still working.
I've tried logging in as another user that had been created and never used (so it should be clean), but the same problem happens. Hence it appears it may be Win10 that's stuffed - but sfc does not find any problem.
I used the easy fix tool from the link you gave to uninstall. First I noticed that the name of the utility is o15-ctrremove.diagcab (i.e. presumably for Office 15). That is after I clicked on Office 13 as my version. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I've always loved M$ support :-(
Anyway, I persevered. The easy fix tool did try to uninstall, after first saying there was a problem uninstalling. And, after it said it finished uninstalling, it brought up a Window stating that the problem found (and fixed) was that Office could not be found. Remember of this for my next steps. I assume they have practical jokers at M$.
The joke got better. After rebooting, a clean install of Office failed because "we found a pre-release or beta version of an Office product on your computer". Control Panel still lists Office 2013, and an uninstall from there now says "Something went wrong. Sorry we ran into a problem". If I now double-click the Word or Excel icons, nothing happens: no error message, and no application running. The same happens when I double-click Office documents (which still have the correct icons)
So I tried the manual install from the same link, and found that uninstall of the MSIs failed because "this action is only valid for products that are currently installed". And I did notice that the MSIs are for Office 15, which is not what I have - but it is the number in name of the "easy" fix tool.
Looks as if M$ stuffed up big time.
Next I went through the registry and Program Files and deleted everything I could find that mentioned Office. The installer now runs further. I'll keep looking for Office files and registry keys and see if I can sort this out.
I do have an image backup, and I may have to use that, but I'm not sure if it dates from before my preview problems started. At least, at the time of the backup, Office was still working.
ASKER
Well, Paragon Backup & Recovery worked beautifully. I now have Office working again, but unfortunately it didn't fix Preview. The problem obviously started before the backup (2 months ago). Over the weekend I may try reinstalling Office again to see if that helps.
Good luck. By the way, internal versioning is Off2013=O15, Off2016=O16. It's found in the registry under the same Name, for example Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER
ASKER
@McKnife Thanks for the version info.
Fortunately, the image restore was very easy, because I keep the OS and apps on an SSD (C:) and ALL data on a hard disk (D:). Of course there are still things that are kept on C:.
Fortunately, the image restore was very easy, because I keep the OS and apps on an SSD (C:) and ALL data on a hard disk (D:). Of course there are still things that are kept on C:.
ASKER
Just to repeat, the original problem is still not fixed: previewing any Office file in Windows Explorer still produces silly errors. AT least the image restore fixed the other weird problems that Office installers and uninstallers produced.
If anyone has any better ideas I'll appreciate them.
If anyone has any better ideas I'll appreciate them.
sfc /scannow
this will fix most of the issues ....
if the issue still remains remove office -repair the windows using windows 10 dvd
reinstall the office
all the best