Office 2016 Strange Issue

DeaconFrost · 07 Mar 2018

That's the best title I could come up with. I have a user with a new Surface Book. Clean install of Windows 10, his necessary software, including Office Pro 2016 x64. This is the disc install version, not Office 365.

He's getting an error saving Word documents from within Outlook. After some troubleshooting, I realized Outlook and Word are showing as 32 bit, yet Excel is 64 bit (and works fine when saving files).

I've never encountered this, and thought it was impossible. I removed Office 2016, ran the Microsoft Fix It Uninstaller, rebooted, and then loaded what I know to me Office 2016 x64. Same damn thing happened.

Has anyone come across this, where certain apps are 32 bit and some are 64? I'm currently looking for a better, more thorough uninstall of Office.

Kari · 07 Mar 2018

I had some weird Office behaviour from mid January on, lasting a few weeks (read more here). Finally resolving the issue required manual removal of all Office stuff, FixIt solution did not work for me.

Complete instructions for manual removal of Office can be found on same page where you download FixIt, see Option Three: Uninstall Office from a PC - Office Support

Kari

Berton · 07 Mar 2018

Office 2010 was the first to be available as either 32-bit or 64-bit. I've had no trouble opening files created in either edition but have seen issues where the 32-bit and 64-bit installations caused problems. I didn't check the 32-bit version but had FrontPage 2003 on a computer and couldn't install the 64-bit version of Office 2010 until I uninstalled FP 2003.

alphanumeric · 08 Mar 2018

One thing I've noticed is if I run the setup.exe, that is in the root of my mounted MSDN ISO, I get the 32 bit office 2016 Pro. To get 64 bit I have to go into the office folder of the ISO and run setup64.exe. To be honest though I only noticed that Outlook was 32 bit, I'm not sure if any 64 bit office apps were installed? Its been my habit to just run setup64.exe. Until recently anyway. I had an issue with Outlook 64 bit where links opened in e-mails took forever to open / launch. No such issue with Outlook 32 bit.

Steve C · 09 Mar 2018

You could try a repair install of MS Office.

DeaconFrost · 09 Mar 2018

Did the repair as the initial step. I also uninstalled Office, ran the Fix-It clean-up tool, rebooted, and then installed again using a known x64 .iso. Same issues.

Kari · 09 Mar 2018

DeaconFrost said:

Did the repair as the initial step. I also uninstalled Office, ran the Fix-It clean-up tool, rebooted, and then installed again using a known x64 .iso. Same issues.

Have you tried installing 32 bit Office instead? Do you really have a reason to use 64 bit Office? I mean, "I want a 64 bit Office" is not a good enough reason. Basically, in most cases 64 bit Office is not necessary.

This quote from https://support.office.com/en-us/art...-6c6f49b8d261:

Reasons to choose the 64-bit version

Computers running 64-bit versions of Windows generally have more resources such as processing power and memory, than their 32-bit predecessors. Also, 64-bit applications can access more memory than 32-bit applications (up to 18.4 million Petabytes). Therefore, if your scenarios include large files and/or working with large data sets and your computer is running 64-bit version of Windows, 64-bit is the right choice when:

You’re working with large data sets, like enterprise-scale Excel workbooks with complex calculations, many pivot tables, data connections to external databases, Power Pivot, 3D Map, Power View, or Get & Transform. The 64-bit version of Office may perform better in these cases. See, Excel specifications and limits, Data Model specification and limits, and Memory usage in the 32-bit edition of Excel.
You’re working with extremely large pictures, videos, or animations in PowerPoint. The 64-bit version of Office may be better suited to handle these complex slide decks.
You’re working with files over 2 GB in Project, especially if the project has many sub-projects.
You’re developing in-house Office solutions like add-ins or document-level customization. Using the 64-bit version of Office lets you deliver a 64-bit version of those solutions as well as a 32-bit version. In-house Office solution developers should have access to the 64-bit Office 2016 for testing and updating these solutions.

Personally I have never seen a reason to use 64 bit Office. I am quite an experienced Office user, always installing the 32 bit version, regardless of my PC / Windows architecture.

I am not saying installing 32 bit Office will resolve your issues. I am just saying, trying it might solve the issues.

Kari

DeaconFrost · 15 Mar 2018

So, I finally figured this out. I'm still baffled, but here goes. I got some time with the laptop, so I did a full install of Office 2016. Then I used the Fix it clean up tool,, followed by a run with CCleaner on the registry. Rebooted, then followed a guide on a manual uninstall. No directories or registry entries existed. I rebooted again and performed a clean install of what I know to be x64. After the install was complete, we noticed duplicate Start Menu icons for each Office app.

One on top opened the newly installed x64 version. The one on the bottom opened an older x86 version that I could not find on the drive moments before. If I right-clicked on the x86 shortcut and chose Uninstall, it would remove the icon within 5 seconds.

I'm kicking myself for not checking the paths of the "bad" icons. However, when I viewed the Start menu shortcuts directory in Explorer, it only showed one icon for each app. So very strange. Long story short, it's working properly as an all x64 Office version now. No issues whatsoever. I'm baffled by this, because I did the manual uninstall and found nothing of Office left behind.