Excel 2016 crashing whenever a drop down menu is the first thing that is selected

Question

Bit of a peculiar one, but we have recently updated to Office 2016 and users a reporting an issue with a number of excel workbooks. The calculators are crashing when they previously were not under Office 2010. Both versions (2010 and 2016) are 32-bit and I have checked with users who have not yet migrated, and the RAM usage is similar for both 2010 and 2016 (comfortably under 2GB) so no surprises there.

The common theme I have discovered is that the crash is occuring when the user opens a workbook, and the first thing they interact with is a dropdown list (data validation) in a cell. This causes the entire excel program to crash and give a memory failure. However, if the user clicks in another cell (literally any random cell) first, before going to the dropdown list, the crash no longer occurs.

There are no add-ins enabled and this crash still occurs in safe mode. Switching to manual calculations also makes no difference to the crash. The file is 80kb in size and does not have thousands of empty rows of data or anything like that. I have done some testing/playing around, and if I exit out of every single program, including Skype, windows explorer, etc. then this does allow me to select the dropdown list as my very first action and it no longer crashes. However, it seems bizarre to me that the act of simply clicking into another cell first would fix this if it really was a memory issue.

Answer 1

Hi @Chris King ,
Did you uninstall Office 2010 and re-install Office 2016 in the same PC?
Did this problem appear in specific Workbooks?
Where did you save the Workbook?
Try to create a new Workbook in desktop with the same drop down list and check the result.
You can also create a new Profile for Windows with the administrator permission.
If this problem appear after re-installing Office 2016, I suggest you try to run the Office support tool and confirm if there is incompletely Office product: https://aka.ms/SaRA-officeUninstallFromPC
Just checking in to see if the information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.

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