Why can I not get any of my Office applications – Word, Excel, etc. – to work.

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When I click on an existing Excel application, nothing happens.  I cannot even get Excel itself to open and I am at a loss as to know what to do.

Supposedly, I have Office 365 installed and yet I do not seem to be able to get any of the apps to open.  How can I tell what version of Office I have installed?  Why can I not get any any of the apps to work/open and yet two weeks ago, everything functioned as expected?  I do not know what I may have done to render Office inoperable.  I have even tried to get Office 365 installed (reinstalled?) and this did not seem to work – could not get it reinstalled.

Any thoughts, insight, ideas, etc. as to how to resolve this issue will be greatly appreciated.

Ron M

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Try Repair Office.

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Hi Ron M:

If b’s suggestion to repair Office doesn’t provide a permanent solution, let us know if you use Avira or BullGuard antivirus.  There is a known issue with the “Sentry” feature these antivirus programs (i.e., the sentryeye.exe engine that is part of the heuristic/behavioural detection) that creates a folder at C:\Windows\Temp\sentry_temp. When CCleaner, BleachBit, or any other disk cleaner purges the contents of C:\Windows\Temp\ is also purges contents of C:\Windows\Temp\sentry_temp, and this can damage the executables of several programs that are monitored by Sentry, including MS Office executables.  If you use Avira or BullGuard see the workaround nukecad posted in B Jones’ thread File or Directory Corrupt After Running CCleaner that requires affected users to create an exclusion for C:\Windows\Temp\sentry_temp in CCleaner (or whatever disk cleaner the they are using) to prevent it from cleaning the contents of that sentry_temp subfolder.

There are also a few CCleaner users currently reporting problems running MS Office programs – see fishpoem’s thread CCleaner v6.09 wipes out Office executables! in the CCleaner Bug Reporting forum for one example – although I’m not sure of the exact cause of this problem yet.
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Dell Inspiron 5584 * 64-bit Win 10 Pro v22H2 build 19045.2604 * Firefox v111.0.0 * Microsoft Defender v4.18.2301.6-1.1.20100.6 * Malwarebytes Premium v4.5.24.248-1.0.1944 * Macrium Reflect Free v8.0.7279 * Microsoft Office Home and Business 2019 (Version 2302 / Build 16130.20306) Click-to-Run * CCleaner Free Portable v6.10.10347

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b

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How can I tell what version of Office I have installed?

Go to Control Panel or Settings and see what Office version is installed

Why can I not get any any of the apps to work/open and yet two weeks ago, everything functioned as expected?

It might be an update installed that broke it. MS is very bad with updates but this is my opinion. Others think that MS is fine with updates. For my experience, MS updates breaks a lot of things and do not fix anything. This is why i stopped using it.

You can try the Office repair as mentioned above. Or try to reinstall it.

Best option in my option might be to walk away from MS and try using Open Office. It is free and has less issues than MS from my experience

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b, I tried Office Repair and it worked.  Thanks very much for the suggestion.

Imacri, I do not use Avira or BullGuard antivirus, so I am guessing there is no issue there, but thanks for the information.

Guest, Office Repair worked.  I have never had any problem with MS updates, but you never know what they might sneak in.

Ron M

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b

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