Disabling GPU acceleration in current version of Word from Office 365

[Billiam29]

Within MS Word, I get “mangled” text display in the most recently typed word or two on a somewhat frequent basis. It goes away when manually moving the cursor around or clicking on a different app’s window and then back to Word. So easy enough to work around quickly, but still irritating enough that I want to do something about it.

I find the same answer everywhere when I look up how to disable GPU acceleration in the Office 365 versions of Word: File > Options > Advanced > Disable hardware graphics acceleration. This option is not present in my installation of Word from Office 365. It’s simply not there. The same setting is also absent from Excel although I’m not sure if it ever existed there.

My web searches have also found the registry setting that corresponds to the GUI app setting, but I’m kind of hesitant to enable it. I’m thinking that if Microsoft yanked the GUI setting for a specific reason, then it may not be the best idea to try “forcing” the setting with the corresponding registry entry.

So has anyone found any information on how to disable GPU acceleration in the most recent-ish version of Word from Office 365 or whether it causes problems to do so? The version I have installed is v16.0.15831.20190.

 

[cnyphotoguy]

Have you tried seeing if there is a newer graphics driver for your system?

 

[LynniePad]

Within MS Word, I get “mangled” text display in the most recently typed word or two on a somewhat frequent basis. It goes away when manually moving the cursor around or clicking on a different app’s window and then back to Word. So easy enough to work around quickly, but still irritating enough that I want to do something about it.

I find the same answer everywhere when I look up how to disable GPU acceleration in the Office 365 versions of Word…

Why do you think that “GPU acceleration” is the culprit?

 

[Billiam29]

Have you tried seeing if there is a newer graphics driver for your system?

I am a bit behind on drivers. However, I’ve done three driver updates since owning Office 365 and nothing has changed regarding MS Word’s behavior. I kind of have my doubts anything is likely to improve if I update my GPU to the very latest.

Besides, simply disabling the GPU functionality in Word would confirm if the GPU is the cause or part of the issue. This is basically the motivation for my post after discovering Word’s GPU setting to not be present in my installation.

 

[Billiam29]

Why do you think that “GPU acceleration” is the culprit?

It’s pretty difficult to describe in words. I guess in theory the problem I’m seeing could be the font rendering engine. You would think that would be something at the Windows OS level though and I’ve not seen this minor-but-annoying issue in anything other than Word. Then again, by volume Word is probably showing me > 90% of the “changing” text I see on screen. It’s just one of those things that I bet if you saw it, your first quick reaction would be ‘try disabling GPU acceleration.’

Overall, the problem is small enough that I don’t really feel like trying anything beyond simply disabling GPU acceleration…if I can just find what’s up with that setting.

FWIW this is on Win 11 22H2, 3070 GPU, a 1920x1200 display, no scaling enabled (100%).

 

[LynniePad]

Why do you think that “GPU acceleration” is the culprit?

It’s pretty difficult to describe in words. I guess in theory the problem I’m seeing could be the font rendering engine. You would think that would be something at the Windows OS level though and I’ve not seen this minor-but-annoying issue in anything other than Word. Then again, by volume Word is probably showing me > 90% of the “changing” text I see on screen. It’s just one of those things that I bet if you saw it, your first quick reaction would be ‘try disabling GPU acceleration.’

Overall, the problem is small enough that I don’t really feel like trying anything beyond simply disabling GPU acceleration…if I can just find what’s up with that setting.

FWIW this is on Win 11 22H2, 3070 GPU, a 1920x1200 display, no scaling enabled (100%).

Despite much experience with Office, I have not heard of rendering glitches such as you mention. Searching does mention some much more extensive “shattering” of text with Word and the other apps, rather than your more restricted problems.

One suggestion that I saw was to try installing a more generic video driver rather than the recommended or latest driver. I would also try the “Repair” option for Office.

• My GPUs have always been rather basic, sometimes integral, with the latest being 1650-S.
• OS has usually been recent Windows, including Win11 22H2.
• Screens mostly 1920x1080 or 3840x2160.
• Documents are typically 100,000 words, 300 pages.

 

[rmexpress22]

I think I recall not being able to disable GPU acceleration also.

You can do it via registry

https://www.top-password.com/blog/disable-hardware-graphic-acceleration-for-office/

There's very little risk in doing this. If it doesn't work, or makes things worse, you can just toggle the option back.

 

[cnyphotoguy]

Have you tried seeing if there is a newer graphics driver for your system?

I am a bit behind on drivers. However, I’ve done three driver updates since owning Office 365 and nothing has changed regarding MS Word’s behavior. I kind of have my doubts anything is likely to improve if I update my GPU to the very latest.

Besides, simply disabling the GPU functionality in Word would confirm if the GPU is the cause or part of the issue. This is basically the motivation for my post after discovering Word’s GPU setting to not be present in my installation.

If other graphics driver updates have had no effect, than it suggests that the graphics settings are not your issue.

 

[Billiam29]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

 

[LynniePad]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

With apparently no solution to the issue with MS Office, you might be forced to either downgrade your GPU or put together a computer specifically for Office applications.

I acquired a Dell G5 (entry-level) games computer and, with some basic modifications, it’s a fine Office computer. 75% of the usage is heavy-duty MS Word…

• CPU 10th generation i7
• 32Gb RAM (up from 8Gb)
• 512Gb SATA SSD (replaces HDD)
• GPU 1650-S
• Win11 upgrade
• 24” ASUS 2k monitor (supports 144Hz)

-It’s an absolute monster for word processing and hasn’t missed a beat.

(Having a separate data drive speeds up operations, particularly for large documents when extensive scrolling is needed).

As a comment, I’ve also found the 1650-S GPU perfectly adequate for games, provided that the FX aren’t wound up to the maximum. But then, I’m no gamer!

 

[Simon Garrett]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

I have the same issue (NVIDIA 1660 Super).

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

--
Simon

 

[LynniePad]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

I have the same issue (NVIDIA 1660 Super).

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

I’m afraid that I have to disagree with you about those supposed bugs. You must be doing something wrong.

MS Office has been absolutely reliable and bug-free in my experience, ever since I bought the floppy disk version in 1994. I’ve regularly updated when each major revision is released, and I cannot recall any problems at all, including Office 365.

We are heavy users of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while MS Outlook gets regular use for email, meetings etc. Other users at this site are also puzzled by your assessment of MS Office.

Hardware consists of two Dell i7 with NVIDIA 1650-S GPU, plus a couple of older AMD notebooks with Radeon integrated GPUs. OS is Win11 or Win10. All systems are completely standard apart from simple upgrades, and no OS tweaks either.

General area of work is historical research (books, monographs) plus the marking of student submissions. Sometimes, due to inexperience, a student will submit MS Word documents of extraordinary size (200Mb), but MS-Word happily digests them and carries on regardless. (Oversize because of included images at original resolution).

 

[Simon Garrett]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

I have the same issue (NVIDIA 1660 Super).

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

I’m afraid that I have to disagree with you about those supposed bugs. You must be doing something wrong.

MS Office has been absolutely reliable and bug-free in my experience, ever since I bought the floppy disk version in 1994. I’ve regularly updated when each major revision is released, and I cannot recall any problems at all, including Office 365.

We are heavy users of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while MS Outlook gets regular use for email, meetings etc. Other users at this site are also puzzled by your assessment of MS Office.

Hardware consists of two Dell i7 with NVIDIA 1650-S GPU, plus a couple of older AMD notebooks with Radeon integrated GPUs. OS is Win11 or Win10. All systems are completely standard apart from simple upgrades, and no OS tweaks either.

General area of work is historical research (books, monographs) plus the marking of student submissions. Sometimes, due to inexperience, a student will submit MS Word documents of extraordinary size (200Mb), but MS-Word happily digests them and carries on regardless. (Oversize because of included images at original resolution).

Well, we may be using different features. Problems I can recall off the top of my head:

Outlook:

• Sometimes hangs
• Search is quixotic. Sometimes it will show nothing and a message "something has gone wrong". Usually closing that window is enough, sometimes Outlook has to be closed and restarted before search will work.
• When you open an email, if you try to move it or even close it, sometimes it will say "Can't close it as it has been changed, do you want to save a copy" even if it hasn't changed. It insists on putting the copy in Inbox, even if the supposedly changed email is somewhere different. It should be able to save in situ (Outlook 2010 would do this).
• In most respects it's more reliable than Outlook 2010, but the problems listed above are new.
• Since about Office 2013, it doesn't integrate with Windows desktop search (even though it uses the same mechanism and search index). You can't open Outlook items in desktop search. Alright, this isn't a bug, it's a negative feature. But why? Desktop search will find Outlook items, but when you click on them, then don't open.

Word:

• Slower than Word 2010 (or LibreOffice) with long documents. Scrolling to the bottom of a 1,500 page document first time after it's opened (when it has to repaginate) can take 20 seconds with the hour glass icon showing and Word unresponsive.
• Sometimes it just hangs repaginating and has to be killed.

Excel:

• I have a number of spreadsheets with graphs in them (created in Excel). None are huge - maybe 100-200 data points. When the graphs are first displayed after opening the file, sometimes it can take 15-30 seconds with the hour glass icon and the screen frozen before it displays the graph. Excel 2010 was instantaneous
• Occasional hangs

None of these are reproducable in the sense that the next time you do the same action it may work, but they are frequent if random. They occur on two different machines I use with different hardware. The majority did not occur in Office 2010.

 

[LynniePad]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

I have the same issue (NVIDIA 1660 Super).

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

I’m afraid that I have to disagree with you about those supposed bugs. You must be doing something wrong.

MS Office has been absolutely reliable and bug-free in my experience, ever since I bought the floppy disk version in 1994. I’ve regularly updated when each major revision is released, and I cannot recall any problems at all, including Office 365.

We are heavy users of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while MS Outlook gets regular use for email, meetings etc. Other users at this site are also puzzled by your assessment of MS Office.

Hardware consists of two Dell i7 with NVIDIA 1650-S GPU, plus a couple of older AMD notebooks with Radeon integrated GPUs. OS is Win11 or Win10. All systems are completely standard apart from simple upgrades, and no OS tweaks either.

General area of work is historical research (books, monographs) plus the marking of student submissions. Sometimes, due to inexperience, a student will submit MS Word documents of extraordinary size (200Mb), but MS-Word happily digests them and carries on regardless. (Oversize because of included images at original resolution).

Well, we may be using different features. Problems I can recall off the top of my head:

Outlook:

• Sometimes hangs
• Search is quixotic. Sometimes it will show nothing and a message "something has gone wrong". Usually closing that window is enough, sometimes Outlook has to be closed and restarted before search will work.
• When you open an email, if you try to move it or even close it, sometimes it will say "Can't close it as it has been changed, do you want to save a copy" even if it hasn't changed. It insists on putting the copy in Inbox, even if the supposedly changed email is somewhere different. It should be able to save in situ (Outlook 2010 would do this).
• In most respects it's more reliable than Outlook 2010, but the problems listed above are new.
• Since about Office 2013, it doesn't integrate with Windows desktop search (even though it uses the same mechanism and search index). You can't open Outlook items in desktop search. Alright, this isn't a bug, it's a negative feature. But why? Desktop search will find Outlook items, but when you click on them, then don't open.

Word:

• Slower than Word 2010 (or LibreOffice) with long documents. Scrolling to the bottom of a 1,500 page document first time after it's opened (when it has to repaginate) can take 20 seconds with the hour glass icon showing and Word unresponsive.
• Sometimes it just hangs repaginating and has to be killed.

Excel:

• I have a number of spreadsheets with graphs in them (created in Excel). None are huge - maybe 100-200 data points. When the graphs are first displayed after opening the file, sometimes it can take 15-30 seconds with the hour glass icon and the screen frozen before it displays the graph. Excel 2010 was instantaneous
• Occasional hangs

None of these are reproducable in the sense that the next time you do the same action it may work, but they are frequent if random. They occur on two different machines I use with different hardware. The majority did not occur in Office 2010.

1. I haven’t needed the search functions of Outlook, but the other issues haven’t arisen.

2. There can be speed issues with Word if the source file is on the same physical drive as the OS/Program. I first noticed this when opening large documents either locally, or via the network. Time to open a file only differed by a few seconds, but scrolling was significantly faster from the network. There are even greater speed gains if the source file is on a separate (local) SSD.

Even though the OS/Program disk was a fast SSD in the original test, it seems that Word’s “housekeeping” for large files (backups etc.) slows everything down when utilising the same disk.

3. I’m not a heavy user of Excel, but I’ve never seen the problems that you mention. At one stage I did set up a matrix inversion stress test with graphical output that worked remarkable fast. Theoretically, there’s 6 x 10^64 calculations!

• Invert 50x50 matrix of random numbers
• Invert the resultant matrix
• Graph differences from the original

I presume that your computers run Photo applications without issue?

 

[Simon Garrett]

FWIW below is an additional thread about the issue over on Tech Power Up. It seems I’m not alone with this and nobody appears to have found a resolution. It does seem to be limited to certain NVIDIA GPUs though.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/graphical-glitch-in-word-and-outlook-office-365.293195/

I have the same issue (NVIDIA 1660 Super).

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

I’m afraid that I have to disagree with you about those supposed bugs. You must be doing something wrong.

MS Office has been absolutely reliable and bug-free in my experience, ever since I bought the floppy disk version in 1994. I’ve regularly updated when each major revision is released, and I cannot recall any problems at all, including Office 365.

We are heavy users of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while MS Outlook gets regular use for email, meetings etc. Other users at this site are also puzzled by your assessment of MS Office.

Hardware consists of two Dell i7 with NVIDIA 1650-S GPU, plus a couple of older AMD notebooks with Radeon integrated GPUs. OS is Win11 or Win10. All systems are completely standard apart from simple upgrades, and no OS tweaks either.

General area of work is historical research (books, monographs) plus the marking of student submissions. Sometimes, due to inexperience, a student will submit MS Word documents of extraordinary size (200Mb), but MS-Word happily digests them and carries on regardless. (Oversize because of included images at original resolution).

Well, we may be using different features. Problems I can recall off the top of my head:

Outlook:

• Sometimes hangs
• Search is quixotic. Sometimes it will show nothing and a message "something has gone wrong". Usually closing that window is enough, sometimes Outlook has to be closed and restarted before search will work.
• When you open an email, if you try to move it or even close it, sometimes it will say "Can't close it as it has been changed, do you want to save a copy" even if it hasn't changed. It insists on putting the copy in Inbox, even if the supposedly changed email is somewhere different. It should be able to save in situ (Outlook 2010 would do this).
• In most respects it's more reliable than Outlook 2010, but the problems listed above are new.
• Since about Office 2013, it doesn't integrate with Windows desktop search (even though it uses the same mechanism and search index). You can't open Outlook items in desktop search. Alright, this isn't a bug, it's a negative feature. But why? Desktop search will find Outlook items, but when you click on them, then don't open.

Word:

• Slower than Word 2010 (or LibreOffice) with long documents. Scrolling to the bottom of a 1,500 page document first time after it's opened (when it has to repaginate) can take 20 seconds with the hour glass icon showing and Word unresponsive.
• Sometimes it just hangs repaginating and has to be killed.

Excel:

• I have a number of spreadsheets with graphs in them (created in Excel). None are huge - maybe 100-200 data points. When the graphs are first displayed after opening the file, sometimes it can take 15-30 seconds with the hour glass icon and the screen frozen before it displays the graph. Excel 2010 was instantaneous
• Occasional hangs

None of these are reproducable in the sense that the next time you do the same action it may work, but they are frequent if random. They occur on two different machines I use with different hardware. The majority did not occur in Office 2010.

1. I haven’t needed the search functions of Outlook, but the other issues haven’t arisen.

2. There can be speed issues with Word if the source file is on the same physical drive as the OS/Program. I first noticed this when opening large documents either locally, or via the network. Time to open a file only differed by a few seconds, but scrolling was significantly faster from the network. There are even greater speed gains if the source file is on a separate (local) SSD.

Even though the OS/Program disk was a fast SSD in the original test, it seems that Word’s “housekeeping” for large files (backups etc.) slows everything down when utilising the same disk.

3. I’m not a heavy user of Excel, but I’ve never seen the problems that you mention. At one stage I did set up a matrix inversion stress test with graphical output that worked remarkable fast. Theoretically, there’s 6 x 10^64 calculations!

• Invert 50x50 matrix of random numbers
• Invert the resultant matrix
• Graph differences from the original

I presume that your computers run Photo applications without issue?

I keep data files on a separate drive (not C. Photo apps work fine. I'd say Lightroom and Photoshop are significantly more reliable than the Office apps I use.

--
Simon

 

[skyglider]

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

Hi Simon,

It appears that there is something wrong with your system, hardware wise. Hanging in MULTIPLE DIFFERENT programs surely indicates a problem in hardware and not the software being used. Especially low demand software like Word, Outlook and Excel.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word really sounds like a hardware problem.

Do you have ECC ram cards? If yes, ignore the rest of this post.

If not, my guess is that you have a marginal ram card. In my full time job repairing computers, those kinds of problems usually ended up being a marginal ram card. Could run ram tests all day with no errors found but replacing the marginal ram card fixed the problem. Of course as the computer manufacturer, we had complete stock of spare printed circuit boards to use to swap with.

The reason ram tests would run error free was traced to the actual data stored in the ram. Specific bit patterns in specific memory locations caused the error. The stock ram tests never stored those specific bit patterns so the error never occurred.

Since you probably don't have spare ram cards to swap with, two ways to troubleshoot your ram are:

1. Swap ram card locations. Like if have 16GB composed of two 8GB ram cards, swap the cards. That will put the marginal ram card in different memory address locations and change the symptoms.

2. Remove half of the ram cards and see what happens. If the hangs/corruption still occurs, replace the installed ram cards with the ones you removed. Check motherboard specs for where low order ram needs to be.

Hope you find your problem.

 

[LynniePad]

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

Hi Simon,

It appears that there is something wrong with your system, hardware wise. Hanging in MULTIPLE DIFFERENT programs surely indicates a problem in hardware and not the software being used. Especially low demand software like Word, Outlook and Excel.

… my guess is that you have a marginal ram card.

That is possible, but the OP’s problems with MS Office seem to have a considerable history; well before the life of the present hardware. The reported stability with other apps also argues against hardware problems, including RAM.

Problems with MS-Office/Office 365 are exceedingly rare in my experience. I’ve run almost all versions of Office on a wide variety of hardware with no issues at all.

 

[Simon Garrett]

Office 365 is quite buggy. I upgraded earlier this year from Office 2010 and was happy at first to find that some of the Office 2010 bugs had gone, only to find a raft of new ones. Word, Outlook and Excel (the main Office programs I use) can all hang at times, or get into a state where only exiting the program and restarting can restore normal behaviour.

For me, Outlook is the worst. Since Office 2000 and before, Outlook has appeared to be the unloved runt of the Office litter, and each new version fixes a few bugs and introduces a tranche of new ones.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word is one of the more benign bugs and I just live with it!

Hi Simon,

It appears that there is something wrong with your system, hardware wise. Hanging in MULTIPLE DIFFERENT programs surely indicates a problem in hardware and not the software being used. Especially low demand software like Word, Outlook and Excel.

Corruption of the last line typed in Word really sounds like a hardware problem.

Do you have ECC ram cards? If yes, ignore the rest of this post.

If not, my guess is that you have a marginal ram card. In my full time job repairing computers, those kinds of problems usually ended up being a marginal ram card. Could run ram tests all day with no errors found but replacing the marginal ram card fixed the problem. Of course as the computer manufacturer, we had complete stock of spare printed circuit boards to use to swap with.

The reason ram tests would run error free was traced to the actual data stored in the ram. Specific bit patterns in specific memory locations caused the error. The stock ram tests never stored those specific bit patterns so the error never occurred.

Since you probably don't have spare ram cards to swap with, two ways to troubleshoot your ram are:

1. Swap ram card locations. Like if have 16GB composed of two 8GB ram cards, swap the cards. That will put the marginal ram card in different memory address locations and change the symptoms.

2. Remove half of the ram cards and see what happens. If the hangs/corruption still occurs, replace the installed ram cards with the ones you removed. Check motherboard specs for where low order ram needs to be.

Hope you find your problem.

Thanks for your suggestions.

I don't have ECC RAM.

The problem mentioned by the OP is one I also get, of occasional slight mangling of the display of the last few characters in Word. This is experienced by others, and appears to be some untoward interaction with some NVIDIA drivers.

The other problems I mentioned are occasional, and are unique to Office 365, but are repeatable on at least two machines I use. I agree they sound like things that could be hardware, but I'm pretty sure in this case they are features of Office. Perhaps I laid it on a bit thick, as none of the problems prevents me using the software effectively.

Outlook in particular does have a few bugs in search. I make heavy use of search, and from discussions with others I think I use it much more than most people. For me, search failure (when Outlook gives up and says something like "unable to search") happens perhaps once a day. I can imagine many people never experience that problem.

 

[skyglider]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I don't have ECC RAM.

The problem mentioned by the OP is one I also get, of occasional slight mangling of the display of the last few characters in Word. This is experienced by others, and appears to be some untoward interaction with some NVIDIA drivers.

Graphic cards affecting the data bus on the motherboard is probably the 2nd suspect after marginal ram. If your motherboard has onboard graphics, I would remove the graphics card and use the onboard graphics to test. No onboard graphics, personally I would buy a cheap graphics card to test rather than live with hangs and corruption. I assume that you are not overclocking your PC(s).

The other problems I mentioned are occasional, and are unique to Office 365, but are repeatable on at least two machines I use. I agree they sound like things that could be hardware, but I'm pretty sure in this case they are features of Office. Perhaps I laid it on a bit thick, as none of the problems prevents me using the software effectively.

Those occasional problems on two different computers do indicate a software rather than hardware problem. But it's hard to fathom that even a percentage of over 345 million users of Microsoft Office are experiencing hangs and corruption. (345 million are the "paid" users)

Outlook in particular does have a few bugs in search. I make heavy use of search, and from discussions with others I think I use it much more than most people. For me, search failure (when Outlook gives up and says something like "unable to search") happens perhaps once a day. I can imagine many people never experience that problem.

If you're using IMAP and searching for data in the body of an email, if Outlook works like Thunderbird, only the subject is stored on the PC. The body of the email is stored on the server. But if you're searching for a contact, then I assume that Outlook stores contacts on the PC's drive.

Gosh, I feel so sorry that you're experiencing hang and corruption problems. I can't even remember the last time I had either on any of the PCs that I've had. But I haven't used Microsoft Office since switching to Win10. Prior to Win10, I used the very old Office 2000 which wouldn't work on Win10.

If you use a search program like "Agent Ransack" to search your drive(s), does it have search failures too?

 

[Paul Stricklin]

Office 2016 Pro displays several problems mostly with delayed keyboard to screen data entry processing in my case - 2 out of 10 pc installs. Multiple complaints spread over many nets spread over several years. Many suggested solution call for turning off GPU.

Paul