[MS Office - 2013] - PowerPoint 2013 - We're sorry something went wrong

[TomTomGo]

Hi All,

 

We've recently upgraded to Office 2013 Professional Plus from Office 2010. Our Workstations are Windows 7 x64 SP1 and this issue is happening on freshly built machines and established installs.

 

When a limited user creates a new presentation, launches Slide Show, right clicks and tries to access the "Pointer Options" to annotate the slide with a pen or highlighter, they receive the following error and no annotations:

 

"We're sorry something went wrong that might make PowerPoint unstable. Please save your presentations and restart PowerPoint"

 

This error doesn't appear as an Admin, so its probably a permissions issue . It also happens on opened presentations. Any pointers as to how to resolve the issue?

 

Cheers

[johnhart96]

I am having this problem as well

[Connect]

have you tried to turn on PC tablet componets in windows features ??

[bezzoh]

Did you find a fix for this, the thread seems to have been stagnant a while. I am currently seeing the same issues on both x86 and x64 clients

[3s-gtech]

Have you installed SP1 and as many updates as are available? Office 2013 was a dog when first released.

[bezzoh]

Yeah, completely up to date but still getting reports from the same 3 people. Wondering if they just need to repair the documents that are possibly corrupted before the problem goes away... or whether I have something more seriously wrong going on. It doesn't help when your users don't reply to emails asking for more info...

[bezzoh]

A profile reset on one of the user's laptops resolved this for a short while... then the issue returned. Really not sure whats happening to the users AppData that keeps this recurring... Anyone else got any further with this yet?

[YuriyK]

I've been fighting this issue for months. The issue transitioned from Lenovo X230 to Surface Pro 3. From Office 2010 to Office 2013. The only thing that seems to fix it temporarily is repairing the office installation.

 

1. Presentation file open

2. Slideshow started

3. Highlighter pen enabled with CTRL+I

4. Draw test with highlighter done

5. Screen cleared with E

6. Computer idle for about 5-10 minutes

7. Go to draw with highlighter, it seems like now the PEN mode is enabled, drawing on the screen doesn’t work. The pen pointer on the screen follows the physical pen pointer. Touching the screen, advances slides instead of drawing.

8. Enabled highlighter via CTRL+I, highlighter icon shows, follows physical pen , does not draw.

9. Press CTRL+I again to enable highlighter pen, PowerPoint bring up an error message. “We’re sorry, something went wrong that might make PowerPoint unstable. Please save your presentations and restart PowerPoint”

 

[bezzoh]

Far simpler cause of this warning for me...

 

Create a new PowerPoint and save it... Close PowerPoint. Reopen new file. Try to save again... Fail

 

I've noticed however that if the PowerPoint.exe background process doesn't terminate when you close the application this doesn't occur but if it does problem crops up (so always occurs after rebooting or logging out and back in).

 

Only for a few users and seemingly random. Can be on a 32 or 64 bit build (though both with 32 bit office).

 

Other than the people involved I can't find a pattern. Reset one users laptop cached user profile the other week and it was fine for ages then suddenly started again.

[YuriyK]

UPDATE:

 

Updated the Surface Pro 3 with all possible windows, firmware, drivers, Office updates possible - issue has been resolved thus far. Pen no longer stops working after powerpoint is in slide show and is idle for more then 10 minutes.

[YuriyK]

Bez: Is this file is saved locally on the hard drive or is it saved on a flash drive? We have encountered issues when copying slides/content from files that are on a flash drive to a locally saved file. Best practice is to always copy the file locally, open, edit and save, then copy back to flash drive.

[bezzoh]

No flash drives even been used throughout testing. I have witnessed this on local files, network files, and even offline cached network files, simply by creating a new doc, closing it, waiting for the powerpoint process to close, then reopening and trying to edit and save it.

[YuriyK]

Have you tried "Online office repair" ? Anything in the Event Viewer logs under Windows Logs / Applications ? If this is this happening across multiple machines, could be a corrupt installation file. Take a snapshot of the "fail" message you receive when re-opening the file and clicking save.

[ChrisERoots]

Been struggling with this myself and I wish I knew which update would solve this. Its very annoying for all concerned.

[bezzoh]

I upgraded one users laptop to 2016 last week to finally put her out her misery. No whilst I've not seen it with my own eyes an hour later she emailed me to say the issue persisted with the new installation (which was also fully patched).

 

She has local app data and a locally cached network home folder.

 

Really annoying me now. It's one of a couple of really persistent issues I'm having with Newer releases of PowerPoint. It's also much slower than 2010 to open files stored on a network share.

[ChrisERoots]

Thanks for the heads up about 2016. I was half thinking that could be the saving grace in all this but I will hold off for longer. You would think that this might have shown up for a few more users online. Massively annoying, i'm going to try installing the Promethean tools and see if this works with 2013 but I very much doubt it. Promethean' ActivInspire doesn't even import files now unless the filename and path doesn't have spaces in it. So much for giving it some time before rolling out an update.