Office 2016 Home and Student Word and Excel will not open

[WCHS]

Office 2016 is not working on my Skylake Win10-1909 laptop. I don’t know which Office forum to post this in, so I am posting it in the default, general Office forum. But, to let you know what kind of MS-Office I have, here is the Account screen from Office 2019 from my other, Whiskey Lake laptop. The Account screen from 2016 looks exactly like this one from 2019. . I think I have Office 2016-C2R and Office 2019-C2R.[They are not subscriptions. These two Office products came with the machines when I bought them and vendor assisted me in activating them.]

Well, here’s the problem. I updated the Skylake machine that is running Office 2016 with the two November 10 patches–the CU for 1909 and the MSRT. After that, I used 2016 Word and 2016 Excel for about an hour or two, but then later when I went to open a Word file, I got this screen:

and then I got this dialogue box:

The same thing happens with an Excel file.

It looks like Office 2016 was updating and ran into a problem. I don’t know how to get it working again. Does anyone have any ideas?

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It could be a problem stemming from the Nov 10 Windows patch(es). But, as I say, both Word and Excel worked for about an hour or two after the Windows updating, and only later ran into problems.

Or it could be a problem stemming from Office updating. I think that Office 2016 Updates on the SkyLake machine are set to automatically install, but I can’t open an Office file to see. But, I say “automatic install” because that’s how it’s set up on the Whiskey Lake machine with Office 2019.
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NOTE: The machine that runs Office 2019 has not been updated yet with the Nov 10 patches, because although I have unhidden the Windows update files, the WU queue has not updated yet, so as of now, Office 2019 is working fine on the Whiskey Lake machine. But in case, there’s a problem with Office updating, I’ve just now set the Update options to “Disable updates” on the Account page in Office 2019 on the Whiskey Lake machine.

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[WCHS]

I checked the Reliability Monitor and during the Windows Update with the Nov 10 patches, there is reconfiguration of four Office 2016 Click to Run Components. I know this always happens with a monthly CU patch, but perhaps the reconfiguration is not compatible with the Office update.

The Reliability Monitor does not show any failure of Office Updating, so it looks like there’s no problem report that’s being sent to Microsoft.

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[Mike]

https://www.google.com/search?q=0xc0000142%20office%202016&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m

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[WCHS]

To @Mike:
A thousand thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
I took the simplest solution first and RESTARTED the machine. (I had already tried shutting down and powering up, but that didn’t work)

After RESTARTing, Word and Excel files now open!! Whew…that was really simple.

Someone here on AskWoody (I won’t mention who) has told me before that Google is a friend. And so are you!! Doubly so.

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[WCHS]

Would a recommendation be to keep the Office Update options set to “Disable Updates” to avoid this problem in the future? Or is this just a one-time fluke (maybe a race condition), with a simple solution, which can be employed anytime, should the problem occur again?

I have to say that I have been using Windows 10 and Office 2016 for 4 years now and this is the first time that I have encountered a problem like this. I am not sure if there’s some proactive maneuver to take against this happening again. But, if there is some advice out there, let me know.

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[Paul T]

If this is the first time you’ve had problems, I’d leave updates enabled but make regular backups.
You should always make backups. 🙂

cheers, Paul

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