Surface Laptop i7 crashing Excel 2016

[Dalen02]

Just had the brand new Surface Laptop i7 delivered. As many will do I immediately converted from Win 10 S to Win 10 Pro and also installed Office 365. Unfortunately Excel 2016 is frequently crashing. After support from both Office team and Surface team all possible solutions have been tested:
• Installing latest Office updates (Excel 16.0.8326.2096)
• Putting Office update on deferred channel and loading an earlier version of Office
• Installing 32-bit version of Office (instead of 64-bit)
• Disabling all Excel Add-ins
• Starting Excel in safe mode
• Disabling hardware graphics acceleration in Excel
• Disabling all start-up programs in Windows
• Updating surface drivers (SurfaceLaptop_Win10_15063_1703008_0.msi)
• Running Surface diagnostics tool
• Completely resetting windows (reinstalling)
• Etc
Still the same problem. It appears to be some kind of driver issue. Microsoft have full logs from Event Viewer and procmon and tell me they are working on the issue. However, it worries me when they tell me that there are only few reports about the issue. Is it perhaps because the Surface i7 model is brand new?

I can reproduce the error repeatedly with these simple steps (see also picture at the end):
1. Start Excel 2016
2. Create a matrix with some numbers
3. Press 'Recommended Charts'
There is usually a 50% chance of crash. (I do it once or twice and it crashes). "Microsoft Excel has stopped working".

The Event Viewer will report either:
• Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 10.0.15063.502 or
• Faulting module name: chart.dll, version: 16.0.8326.2096
This is not the only way but it is the easiest way to crash it. There are also problems with button labels not showing properly (just blank without any text) and some other issues.

Are there any other Surface Laptop users that experience the same problem? If it is working on your machine can you pls let me know (perhaps there is a hardware issue on mine).

Thanks for help!

 

[Chribol]

Hi

We have similar issues with Surface Laptops and Excel. Actually we have 3 Surface Laptops. One is working properly and 2 (from another distributor) have the following issues:
- Installing Windows 10 Enterprise (1703 or 1709, doesn't matter)
- Installing all drivers from Settings -> Update
- Installing Excel 2013
- Create a new Excel Sheet and add a Chart
- Right-click Axis -> Edit Axis
- Excel crashes (Fault Module oart.dll), every time
- Aslo not possible: Open www.office.com in Edge or IE (Website cannot be opened)

Never seen something like that before.

 

[Chribol]

Our solution for this Excel issue: Control Panel -> Region -> Format: Choose anything else as "Match Windows display languege (recommended). Problem solved

 

[pseudoware]

As an owner with an i7 and an Excel 2016 user, this thread naturally had me concerned. FWIW, I'm unable to reproduce a crash with Excel 2016 following the steps above. I've never changed the control panel -> region -> format settings. I have 1709 installed.

 

[srmccoy]

I'm not having this specific crash, but both my wife and I are having ongoing issues with Excel. I'm on a Surface Laptop and she's on an HP Envy x360 (AMD). We noticed it after a recent update to Office 365. Basically anytime we try to use CTRL to select a specific range of cells we get a crash around 80% of the time.

I'm not 100% certain these issues are related to the Laptop, but rather increasingly buggy Office releases over the last couple of years.