Excel documents not consistently open in browser

Question

Product: SharePoint 2016/Office Online Server

We have recently been experiencing an issue where an excel document sometimes opens a blank page in browsers when requested from SharePoint. This is not happening all the time (opening the same document later works sometimes). Other document types such as Word, PowerPoint opens in browsers consistently.

We have not been able to find any notable logs except the following logged occasionally:

ExcelServicesWfeWatchdog reported status for ExcelServicesWfe in category 'WfeHealth'. Reported status: Got CommunicationException when running WFE watchdog health test: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error.

The issue was fixed a couple of weeks ago when we installed HTTP Activation feature on Office Online Server - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/dodeitte/how-to-get-office-web-apps-server-2013-to-report-a-healthy-health-status. However the issue came back again this week.

There was an Cumulative Update installed recently (KB4580346), which we are not sure might be related to the issue.

Is anybody experiencing the similar issue recently?

Answer 1

Hi @Jumpei Yamauchi

Does this happen to specific files or all files? It seems that it appears randomly?

Please check if the following article is helpful to you：

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/649d8633-0908-4d98-aee0-b81de37d7a51/office-online-server-2016-health-status?forum=OfficeOnlineServer

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