Recovering From Microsoft Office “Freezes”

Sometimes, a Microsoft Office program will “freeze” or “hang”, meaning that it is still actually running, but is totally unresponsive - usually this happens just when you are on a deadline and have some critical work not yet saved…

This tip may just save the day - it won’t work all the time, but when it does, it’s magic. You do need to have several Office programs open at the same time, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook.

1. Decide which of the Office programs has the least important data - for example, it might be Word, when you have a critical Excel spreadsheet open with unsaved changes
2. “Kill” the least important program - usually you just click the red ‘X’ button to close its window, and Windows will ask you to confirm. In some cases you may need to use Task Manager (right-click on the task bar, or Ctrl/Alt/Del on Windows and select Task Manager) to end the process.
3. Usually, the surviving program (Excel in this example) will spring back to life. Be sure to save its open files right away!
4. Just to be safe, quit all of your Office programs, including Outlook, and start them again.

I had to do this the other day and it worked like a charm.

Of course, there’s always a chance that you will have to “kill” all of the Office programs, but this tip takes only a few seconds to try out.

If you do end up killing Outlook, you might need to read my article about how some Outlook repair tools actually make things worse, even before you use the Microsoft Inbox Repair Tool.