The company says it resolved a bug causing crashes

Jul 8, 2022 19:01 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently released a new fix for its Office productivity suite, as the company says Word, Excel, and PowerPoint could crash when cloud documents were loaded.

In a tech support document published today, Microsoft explains the glitch only affected Office version 2205. It was exclusive to documents stored in the cloud, with the Office apps crashing all of a sudden with absolutely no error showing up on the screen.

“Word, Excel, and PowerPoint might close unexpectedly when opening, closing, saving, uploading, or downloading cloud files in Office Version 2205.  No errors are displayed when the application suddenly closes,” the software giant explains.

The fix is part of the latest Office update, so if you previously encountered the bug, the only thing you need to do is to make sure you are running the latest version of the productivity suite.

A fix is already available for all Office users

If you’re not sure the patch is already installed or not, the version you must be running (and which includes the fix) is version 2205 build 16.0.15330.20230.

If the fix isn’t already on your device, you can just update the Office suite from the built-in auto-update engine.

“The problem has been fixed in Office Version 2206 (Build 16.0.15330.20230).  The fix is being rolled out to users via an update.  You can install the update manually by opening the Office app and selecting File > Account > Update Options > Update Now,” the Redmond-based software giant continued.

It goes without saying this was a pretty major bug, especially because the Office apps crashed without an error, making it impossible to figure out what went wrong. The issue did not occur with locally-stored documents, so it only impacted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint when required to handle cloud documents. As said, only version 2205 was affected.