Cannot format note comment color in Excel 365 Business on Surface Book - 128GB i5 8GB

Question

case ** 

Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 10.0.17763 

Office 365 Business 

Recently we have been trying to format note comment color so so that the notes are color coded. Pretty simple, right?

Ever since receiving 1809 and KB4338819 specifically, this feature has stopped working entirely. As in you create a new note (Yellow sticky pad), type a comment out, highlight the selected text you wish to change the color of, and then right click to see the pop up menu to ' format comment' within the note. Then the option to change to 'color' allows you to choose a color from the drop down menu, right? 

Except it picks a color and then reverts back to 'Automatic' EVERY TIME.

Removing KB4338819 fixes it, however this KB comes back when Windows updates. This has been occurring for months. We have opened a ticket with Microsoft, they said it was just a corrupted version of office. They uninstalled and reinstalled ( KB4338819 was not on the system at the time when they did this ) and it was working, until the computer updated and then the 'change color comment in note' feature stopped working again. Contacted support again and they did the same thing ( uninstall and reinstall ) this time leaving the KB4338819 and it did not make a difference. 

Are we missing something? 

I would say this is a one off issue and that we need to reinstall the O.S. BUT, we purchased a new Surface book from the Microsoft store on Friday, February 1st, 2019, hoping that we could install office 365 Business and that everything would work fine. Except it does not.

The new Surface is running Windows 10 Home 1803 17134.523 and this one does NOT have KB4338819

Please, help

Answer 1

Cliff, 

(on the new computer )

The version of office 365 is up to date completely. We did run a repair, however this still did not correct the issue. 

We noticed there were at least 7 or 8 firmware updates for the physical device itself waiting to install.

Excel  only worked after we removed KB4480966 and then we rebooted and it stopped working. 

After that, we ran all updates for 1809 and rebooted around 11 times and everything seems to be working and stable.

Answer 2

Dear Berjack2,

From your description, it seems that the issue now happens on Windows 10 Home 1803 17134.523. If yes, I’d like you to confirm whether you have the latest version of the Excel 2016 application now. If no, update the version, do a test and let us know the result. Meanwhile, upload a full screenshot of the Account page in the Excel 2016 application for our reference.

Note: Remove any private information before uploading the screenshots.

About “ Except it picks a color and then reverts back to 'Automatic' EVERY TIME.”, does the color reverts to Automatic after you reopen the Excel file? Could you list the detailed reproducing steps of the color issue?

 

Moreover, I suggest you go to Control Panel>Programs>right-click on the Office 2016 applications’ icon>Change>Online Repair and then restart the computer to see the result.

Best Regards,

Cliff

Answer 3

Dear Berjack2,

Thanks for your latest updates here and I’m glad to hear that the issue goes away after you run all updates for Windows 10 1809.

I suggest you keep all updates on your computer as well. Welcome to post a new thread on our forum if you encounter any issues and we’ll try our best to help you.

Best Regards,

Cliff