Surface Laptop i7 crashing Excel 2016

Question

PLEASE DO NOT MOVE TO OTHER FORUM. THIS IS A SURFACE LAPTOP ISSUE.

This is NOT a general Excel issue. It works fine on other computers in many different configurations. It is likely a bad driver or maybe a hardware failure. 

Just had the brand new Surface Laptop i7 delivered. As many will do I immediately converted from Win 10 S to Win 10 Pro and also installed Office 365. Unfortunately Excel 2016 is frequently crashing. After support from both Office team and Surface team all possible solutions have been tested:

• Installing latest Office updates (Excel 16.0.8326.2096)
• Putting Office update on deferred channel and loading an earlier version of Office
• Reinstalling Office
• Installing 32-bit version of Office (instead of 64-bit)
• Disabling all Excel Add-ins
• Starting Excel in safe mode
• Clearing %appdata%\Microsoft\Excel\
• Disabling hardware graphics acceleration in Excel
• Changing "Ignore Other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)" in Excel
• Disabling all start-up programs in Windows
• Updating surface drivers (SurfaceLaptop_Win10_15063_1703008_0.msi)
• Running Surface diagnostics tool
• Changing default printer
• Add a new user profile on the computer and use Excel from this
• Completely resetting windows (reinstalling)
• Trying without any virus software (only Win Defender)
• Etc

Still the same problem. It appears to be some kind of driver issue. Microsoft have full logs from Event Viewer and procmon and tell me they are working on the issue. However, it worries me when they tell me that there are only few reports about the issue.  Is it perhaps because the Surface i7 model is brand new?

I can reproduce the error repeatedly with these simple steps:

1. Start Excel 2016
2. Create a simple matrix with some numbers (e g 2 rows by 2 columns)
3. Press 'Recommended Charts'

There is usually a 50% chance of crash. (I do it once or twice and it crashes). "Microsoft Excel has stopped working".

When Excel is crashing the Event Viewer will report one of these errors:

• Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 10.0.15063.502
• Faulting module name: chart.dll, version: 16.0.8326.2096
• Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.15063.447

This is not the only way but it is the easiest way to crash it. There are also problems with button labels not showing properly (just blank without any text) and some other issues.

Are there any other Surface Laptop users that experience the same problem? If it is working on your machine can you pls let me know (perhaps there is a hardware issue on mine).

Thanks for help!

More detailed information from Event viewer:

Here are some event errors

Faulting application name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 16.0.8326.2096, time stamp: 0x59a4b539

Faulting module name: chart.dll, version: 16.0.8326.2096, time stamp: 0x59a4aa21

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x0000000000614c39

Faulting process ID: 0x1994

Faulting application start time: 0x01d327dae2cfd061

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE

Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\chart.dll

Report ID: f1b4c1c6-8d8e-4d67-b776-2cfaab19ba69

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Faulting application name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 16.0.8326.2096, time stamp: 0x59a4b539

Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.15063.447, time stamp: 0xa329d3a8

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x00000000000a91b2

Faulting process ID: 0x204c

Faulting application start time: 0x01d327db5b7265b3

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE

Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll

Report ID: 12ca1a43-1ba4-468f-b92d-b1769c533563

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Answer 1

I also had Excel issues with my new Dell i7 laptop similar to the ones described in this thread so I've been following it for a while. Yesterday I found the reason to my issue and it was due to the region format set in control panel. 

I posted my solution in i7 with Intel integrated Graphics crashing Excel 2016 and thought I post here to in case anyone else share the same problem as me. 

My computer was set to match the display language in Windows and that resulted in "English (Sweden)". Changing it to "Swedish (Sweden)" or "English (United states)" solved the issue for me.

Answer 2

Can someone pls test this on another Surface Laptop i7 to see if it works or not.

1. Start Excel 2016
2. Create a simple matrix with some numbers (e g 2 rows by 2 columns) and select it
3. Press 'Recommended Charts

This is what I get most of the time

Answer 3

what is the SRX number for your case?

>>Microsoft have full logs from Event Viewer and procmon and tell me they are working on the issue

Answer 4

Surface support team: SRX1397144289ID

Office 365 business team: Ticket #30126-6290422

Answer 5

I emailed an internal contact on your issue, and the reply was

"Office is the right support team to be driving this.  They will have to debug

the crash to see what is causing it.  It might be specific to the Intel Video

driver on laptop but only a debug of the crash can tell for sure what the issue

is.."

If you want to try to see if this happens on other Surface Laptops - if you are

in the USA, go to the closest physical retail Microsoft Store and have them try

this scenario on their test Surface Laptops at the store.

>>Surface support team: SRX1397144289ID

>>

>>Office 365 business team: Ticket #30126-629042