5 steps to repair Microsoft Office

We’ve all been there. You’re working on a document or a spreadsheet, or using email, and BAM! One of your Microsoft Office applications starts acting weird or stops responding.

Please relax, and don’t give in to panic or upset. This sort of thing does occur from time to time, and it is often quite easy to repair.

(Note that this story focuses on how to fix Office apps in a Windows environment only, not macOS, iOS, or Android.)

Common issues with Microsoft Office apps

Whether you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or a perpetual-license version of Office (such as Office 2019 or 2021), these are some typical problems you might encounter that would necessitate a repair operation:

• App won’t launch, or hangs shortly after launch (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)
• App reports an error after attempting an update, or update won’t work
• App runs sluggishly or on-screen updates don’t match keyboard inputs
• Styles or formatting doesn’t work properly or can’t be changed
• File save (or “Save as…”) doesn’t work
• Excel doesn’t provide access to or recognize some/all formulas

Indeed, there are lots of ways Office components can — and sometimes do — go wrong. When such things happen, that’s when repairs can help.

How to repair Microsoft Office

In this story, I’ll take you through a series of progressively aggressive (and more time-consuming) repairs for Windows-based Office apps. At each step in the path, I assume the preceding items in the sequence haven’t worked.

Spoiler alert! The absolute worst case requires running a cleanup tool on the current Office installation, followed by a clean install of a new copy of Office. That has never failed in my experience, any time I’ve had to go that far.

That said, let’s start with Step 1. In many cases, this will be the only step in the sequence. Why? Because it fixes many of the ails and gotchas that can occasionally bedevil Microsoft Office.

Step 1: Close all apps and reboot your PC

This technique usually fixes one of the most common causes for Office issues: updating Office while apps or applications in the suite are open. The installer/updater can get hornswoggled when this happens, and Office instability can result.

If you decide to update Office, the best thing to do is to exit all Office apps or applications first, apply the updates, then reboot the PC when the updates are finished. Then you can be relatively sure that everything will work as it should when you next open Office apps for continuing use. For an illustrative “war story” on this topic, see my July 9, 2024 blog post Word Gets Seriously Weird.

Step 2: Run the Office Quick Repair tool

All Office installations include a built-in repair tool. That’s a good place to go if a simple reboot doesn’t fix what ails Office.

Subscription-based versions of Office may be accessed through Settings > Apps > Installed apps. Find your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 installation in the list. If you click on the ellipsis at its right, as shown in Figure 1, you’ll see two options: Modify and Uninstall.

Select Modify, and the Microsoft Office repair dialog will open, as shown in Figure 2.

For perpetual-license versions of Office (e.g., Office 2021, 2019, or something older) you’ll need to start in Control Panel > Programs and Features and right-click on any Office component. Then select Modify from the pop-up menu, at which point the same Microsoft Office repair dialog shown in Figure 2 will open.

As you can see, there are two radio buttons in the Office repair tool: Quick Repair and Online Repair. You’ll want to try them in that order. (Online Repair is the subject of the next step in this sequence.)

For the record, Quick Repair uses local files from your PC to attempt its fixes (no download required). As its name suggests, Online Repair downloads known, good, working files from Microsoft servers to do likewise. Online Repair takes longer but uses a guaranteed source that may overcome local file issues that could otherwise stymie repairs.

However you get to the Microsoft Office repair dialog box, you should attempt its Quick Repair first. Select the Quick Repair radio button and then click the Repair button at the bottom right. The tool will ask you to confirm that you’re ready to start, as shown in Figure 3.

When permission is explicitly granted, the repair tool grinds through its paces to attempt repairs using local files. While this process is underway, the progress bar shown in Figure 4 will cycle back and forth.

When the Quick Repair tool is finished, a completion notice (or an error message) will appear on your PC. Figure 5 shows a successful completion.

Although the status information in Figure 5 says “You can now close this window and use your programs,” you may instead decide to reboot your PC before returning to work inside Office.

If you received an error message or the Quick Repair doesn’t result in a working Office installation, you can re-run the Microsoft Office repair tool using the Online Repair option instead. In that case, proceed to Step 3.

Step 3: Use the Office Online Repair Tool

I won’t go through every step of the Online Repair tool’s progression. Why? Because it’s essentially the same as the Quick Repair sequence shown in Figures 2 through 5.

On my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop (8^th Gen/Coffee Lake CPU, 32 GB RAM, Samsung OEM PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD, Wi-Fi LAN connection 802.11ax), Quick Repair took between 3 and 4 minutes. On that same machine, Online Repair took nearly 6 minutes. (It took 150 seconds just to get to the “Please stay online…” notification shown in Figure 6.)

When the Online Repair is complete, it shows an “all set” message and flashes a notification that you can return to work using Office apps as well. The former appears in Figure 7.

If running the Online Repair tool doesn’t result in a working Office environment, or if it emits an error message instead of the foregoing status, you’ll need to move onto Step 4. In my experience using the Quick and Online Repair tools, only 1 in 5 or so Office troubleshooting incidents have required another step.

Step 4: Try Microsoft SaRA

Microsoft SaRA is the shorthand name for the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. Microsoft itself uses this program for troubleshooting. Indeed, if you call Microsoft Support or engage with them via online chat, they may ask you to run this web-based tool (or run it for you, as circumstances may dictate).

The basic web UI for SaRA for Office appears in Figure 8. As you can see, it also supports tabs for Outlook, Teams, and Advanced Diagnostics as well. If you’re still troubleshooting, you will know which one(s) to explore. There are five Outlook buttons, three Teams buttons, and five Advanced Diagnostics buttons (of which the ROI Full Scan is probably the most helpful) in addition to the seven general Office buttons visible in Figure 8.

Please note: this tool helps only with issues related to Office installation, set-up, removal activation and sign-in, along with more focused checks for Excel, Teams, and Outlook issues on the other tabs. If none of these fit your situation, move along to Step 5.

Otherwise, work your way through the various Office buttons in the SaRA UI shown in Figure 8, and explore the other tabs (Outlook, Teams, and Advanced Diagnostics) as well. If some particular button’s text addresses your specific issue, SaRA can probably help. If not, you’ll need to advance to Step 5.

Step 5: Wax off, wax on (remove and replace Office)

If you have to go this far during actual Office repairs, my condolences. You’re probably feeling pretty frustrated by now. Be of good cheer! We’re going to download and run a tool that completely obliterates your current Office installation. Then you’ll download and install a fresh, new installation from the Microsoft Office download page.

First, a precautionary detour

Whenever you make major changes to a Windows PC — and what we’re about to do surely counts — it’s a good idea to back up your current installation and know how to restore it. That is, unless you already have a current image: I make a fresh one at 9:00 every morning using Macrium Reflect, and I always keep the Macrium Rescue Disk (a bootable flash drive that knows how to find and restore Macrium image files) handy.

Even so, if it were late in the day, I would make a fresh backup myself at this point. On my systems, this typically takes under 15 minutes, so it’s not a huge wait. (It just took 7 minutes on my test PC.) YMMV.

One more thing: if you’re running an older version of Office — namely Office 2016 or older — you’ll need to save a copy of your Office key in case you need it upon reinstallation. WinAero.com has a handy script you can use to retrieve such keys: make sure you get it, write it to a file, and put it on a USB drive before you go any further down the “wax off, wax on” path described here. Then you’ll be able to access it later on, should you need it.

Newer versions (and subscriptions) are registered with Microsoft activation servers online, so those keys can find themselves, as it were.

Download and run OffScrub

First, download Microsoft’s automated tool for Office clean-up from the Support page named Uninstall Office automatically. It’s named SetupProd_OffScrub.exe, so I’m in the habit of calling it “OffScrub.” Once you install and run that file, you’ll see it uses an older, .exe-based incarnation of the SaRA tool to do its specific thing — namely, to remove all traces of any existing Office installations on the PC where it’s run.

The first thing it does is to install a slimmed-down version of SaRA. It asks for permission to install before commencing, then asks again for agreement when the installer gets up and running, as shown in Figure 9.

Click I agree as shown above, after which Windows may request permission to install a supporting DLL. Agree to that if it appears. (It will not if the DLL is already present on the target PC.)

Finally, the SaRA interface for OffScrub appears, as shown in Figure 10. This particular PC is running a subscription version (type = “Click to Run”); perpetual versions will appear as Office 2019 or 2021 (or something older, if that’s what you’ve got). Click the checkbox to remove the corresponding Office installation, then click the Next button (lower right) to proceed, as shown in Figure 10.

When you click Next, OffScrub gets to work. First, it detects the chosen installation (this took under a minute on the X1 Extreme), uninstalls the chosen Office files (10 minutes or so), and cleans up everything related it can find in the registry and in the Windows file system (12+ minutes). Then, finally, your old install of Office is gone, gone, gone.

Once OffScrub has finished, you must then reinstall Office. If you’re running a subscription or current perpetual edition, you can visit the Microsoft support page “Download and install or reinstall Microsoft 365 or Office 2021…” and follow its instructions.

If you’re running an older version of Office, you’ll need to lay hands on the right installer. If you don’t have it, you can use the HeiDoc.net Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool to grab the version you need. I just checked: it still works for Office versions from 2010 through 2019.

The end of the Office repair road?

If Office still doesn’t work after the “wax off, wax on” maneuver, you’ve got bigger problems than you thought. That means it’s time to think about an in-place upgrade install for the Windows OS itself as your next move. I wrote a step-by-step story on that very topic for Computerworld in 2018: see “How to fix Windows 10 with an in-place upgrade install.”

Here’s hoping this step-by-step guide has helped you solve your Office problems as simply as possible. You don’t want to walk this whole road unless you must. (I know, from bitter experience.) Good luck!

This article was initially published in April 2021 and updated in August 2024.