Constant Freezing and Crashing

Hi everyone,

Trying to troubleshoot a strange Excel issue affecting a number of users in our environment and I’m curious if anyone else has seen something similar.

Users report that Excel will lock up when switching between applications or when copying between Excel workbooks. The freeze can last around 10–30 seconds, after which Excel either recovers or occasionally crashes completely. If excel recovers for several more seconds clicking a cell sometimes selects the wrong cell or highlights an entire range instead of the single cell that was clicked. For example, the user clicks one cell but Excel highlights several cells nearby. Maybe an issue with DPI scaling issues?

Some environment details:

• Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise)
• Monthly Enterprise Channel
• Most affected machines running version 16.0.19530.20226
• Some users on 16.0.19426.20260
• Mix of Windows 10 and Windows 11

The issue appears across different machines and hardware, including multiple laptop brands and models with both lower and higher specs, so it doesn’t seem to be related to performance.

It also doesn’t appear tied to workbook size as the issue happens with both small spreadsheets and larger ones. Resources look normal when the freeze occurs.

Typical triggers seem to be:

• copying between Excel workbooks
• switching between Excel and another application (browser, Outlook, etc.)
• returning focus back to Excel

Files are opened from a mix of locations:

• OneDrive
• SharePoint
• OneDrive SharePoint sync folders
• local files

Users are working on laptops connected to external monitors, usually with the laptop screen still open as well. Some setups do have mixed display scaling (e.g. laptop at 150% and monitor at 100%) which could be causing the crashes?

Things we’ve already tried:

• disabling hardware graphics acceleration
• disabling Live Preview
• disabling background error checking
• setting Excel to power saving GPU mode in Windows graphics settings
• testing across different machines and workbooks

The issue appears specific to Excel, since other applications on the same machines don’t show similar freezing or input issues.

Has anyone run into something similar with recent Microsoft 365 builds or seen Excel behave like this when switching between apps? Any suggestions for additional things to test would be really helpful. I am loosing my mind.