Mac Excel -- Text not showing in cell when typed out

Question

Hi,

I'm currently experiencing an issue with Mac Excel 16.49 in which the text is not displayed in the cell while typing. It shows in the fx bar and then in the cell once the return button is hit. This happens on both saved and new documents. I have the "Edit directly in cells" preferences checked.

I have tried deleting the "com.microsoft.Excel.plist" file in the library/containers/Microsoft Excel/Data/Library/Preferences folder. which did not help. I tried deleting all my Office apps, and re-installing from the )365 portal. Also did not help.

I am on Excel version 16.49, and on Mac Big Sur 11.4. (It also did this on Big Sur 11.3, so I upgraded to 11.4, hoping it would fix the problem, which it did not.)

Any tips or ideas? Thank you!

--Mark

Answer 1

Thanks for your help.

I first tried deleting the entire remove folder : ~/Library/Containers/Microsoft Excel folder, which did not fix it...

But deleting the following three files in the /Library/Group Containers did the trick and now it works as intended.

• UBF8T346G9.ms
• UBF8T346G9.Office
• UBF8T346G9.OfficeOsfWebHost

Thank you!

--Mark

Answer 2

Hi MrStrass,

Thank you for querying in this forum.

From your description, it seems that the text you typed cannot be displayed in the cell and it shows in formula bar. And you have tried deleting the com.microsoft.Excel.plist, however, the same problem still persists.

If my understanding is right, we do understand the inconvenience caused and apologize for it. We have tested it on our side with the latest version of Excel 16.49 and we found it works fine on our side. And we cannot reproduce the same situation as yours.

Since you mentioned old files and new files have the same problem, this issue may be related to Excel client or local environment, we will give you some suggestions below and hope that will help you:

1. We noticed that you have deleted com.microsoft.Excel.plist, we’d suggest you try to remove folder : ~/Library/Containers/Microsoft Excel(press command +shift +G and enter the route to go the folder) to remove the whole corrupt caches folder of the app instead of plist file and check the result.
2. You can set up Mac in safe mode according to this article: Start up in safe mode. This can help you troubleshoot whether it is caused by third-party software.
3. If the suggestions above don’t work, you try to remove folder : ~/Library/Group Containers. Ctrl + click each of these folders if present, and Move to Trash.

• UBF8T346G9.ms
• UBF8T346G9.Office
• UBF8T346G9.OfficeOsfWebHost

If you have any significant customizations that you back them up first. You can go to ~/Library/Containers/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Contents to check if you want to back up any customized files.

At the same time, if it is convenient to you, may I know if you just encountered such issue in Excel 16.49? May I know if you encountered such issue in previous version of Excel?

Thank you for your understanding!

Best Regards,

Sukie

Answer 3

Hi MrStrass,

We appreciate that you posted back and shared the results with us.

We’re glad to hear that you have solved the problem via deleting the group containers folder. We’re glad to hear that our suggestion is helpful, if you have any other questions, you can post questions in our forum and we will try our best to help you.

Best regards,

Sukie