[ms office - 2016] Excel 2016 blank screen when opening file

[dapaulio]

I have a problem with excel, when you open an excel file it opens excel application but not the file.

 

If you click file open and select the same file it would then open fine

 

If you open excel and drag the file in it opens fine.

 

You google the problem you get a lot of

View unhide

disable ignore DDE

Disable hardware acceleration

Repair office

Reinstall office

There was a reg hack in the hkey class root changing part of a string /dde to %1 that I tried but this also didn’t work

 

The problem happens on all users, domain admins included

 

None of these have worked and it’s frustrating me

Any words of wisdom.

TIA

[snagrat]

Any Add-ons running?

[dapaulio]

No add ins are running. I Checked that also

Thanks

[Michael]

The only time I've seen similar behaviour was due to Office 365 and Office 2013 installed on the same device.

[dapaulio]

The only time I've seen similar behaviour was due to Office 365 and Office 2013 installed on the same device.

 

Thanks but this is a newly built machine thru config manager

[Michael]

Have you deployed any patches to Office 2016? Or is any other application trying to hijack file associations used with Office 2016?

 

What format are the Excel file(s)?

 

Does this not happen with Word 2016 for example?

[dapaulio]

These are xlsx and Xls files, doesn’t matter where it is opened from eg network or local and who it is opened by eg domain admin, restricted user

 

Other office applications don’t seem to be affected.

 

All the sites We manage are patched to the same level and only this site shows the symptoms. It’s a newly deployed site via config manager. New sccm new ou structure with company standard group policies we deploy everywhere.

Its really strange because I can’t find the difference between this site and another.

 

I’m hoping it just an oversight but our technical consultants are swamped at the moment and will eventually get back to me but was hoping if anyone had any ideas that I could pursue maybe I don’t have to wait as long and resolve it

 

TIA

Edited August 22, 2020 by dapaulio

[andyk1975]

Have you managed to get to the bottom of this issue?

 

We are having the same issue, but only with the odd machine.

 

Like you say it is frustrating as everything else is the same across the network, and I can't see any differences between those affected machines and the ones that are working!

 

Like you we have tried all the work rounds and fixes but no joy - I was wondering whether there is a windows update affecting things, but all machines have the same updates!

 

Will post if I find anything useful.

[andyk1975]

Well, I have fixed the issue for the time being.

 

I concluded that other users could use excel without any issue on the offending machine, so I removed the users local cached profile from that machine, restarted and excel is now working correctly for her.

 

I will investigate further to see what is cached in the local profile that would be causing Excel to behave like this. Something is appdata no doubt.

[dapaulio]

We found a conflict with netsupport which forced them to acknowledge the bug after they manage to replicate the symptoms.

A new update has already been released.

 

This seems to have resolved the issue in our test environment and no further reports have been raised.

[HarryMonkey]

Sorry to resurrect this ancient thread but this issue has just reared its ugly head at one of my schools. When double clicking on an excel file, I just get the empty screen. I can open the file by going to File and browsing for it and it opens fine, just not be double clicking. I have tried the remedies online (that the OP also listed). This is Win 10 and Office 2016., logged in as an ordinary user and as a domain admin.

 

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[Michael]

Sorry to resurrect this ancient thread but this issue has just reared its ugly head at one of my schools. When double clicking on an excel file, I just get the empty screen. I can open the file by going to File and browsing for it and it opens fine, just not be double clicking. I have tried the remedies online (that the OP also listed). This is Win 10 and Office 2016., logged in as an ordinary user and as a domain admin.

 

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

 

The latest I've observed this behaviour is with NetSupport's Classroom.Cloud. Contact their support and there's a workaround whereby you can apply a GPO to change the behaviour of the Classroom.cloud client. This applies after the device has been restarted.