Office 2013 graphics crash on my laptop

I have a MacBook pro that I run exclusively with Windows 7.  No boot camp, no OSX etc…

When I went to load Office 2013 today it all installed fine … but failed to load when I tried to open any apps.

E.g:

image

I figured out (I cant say how) that its got something to do with Offices new graphics hardware acceleration support.

If you are into fiddling with the registry you can disable this via the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0CommonGraphics

(PS: if it doesn’t exist then create it)

Then create a DWORD value in there called “DisableHardwareAcceleration” and set it to “1” e.g.

SNAGHTML402923

Then Office apps would startup correctly:

image

Like I said above it might be something to do with my graphics driver and the card in the laptop.  Here is what I have loaded:

image

I hope this saves some frustration and pain for anyone else out there having this problem.

Update: @waldekm also tells me this has solved an issue he was having with Office in a Virtual Machine being sluggish or slow and sometimes crashing.  Turning off hardware acceleration seems to have fixed this for him also.

Thanks,

-CJ.

38 thoughts on “Office 2013 graphics crash on my laptop

  1. Richard

    From the command prompt (all one line):

    reg ADD HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0CommonGraphics /v DisableHardwareAcceleration /t REG_DWORD /d 1

    Reply
    1. David

      Your solution to the Office 2013 graphics crash seems to be extremely effective for other users, but I tried pasting your command into my command prompt, but get “ERROR: Invalid key name”.

      Is there something else I should be doing to make the command work?

      thanks for your help!

      Reply
    2. Roger

      Also suffered from this problem and got round it by going into WORD – Open a blank document – FILE – OPTIONS- ADVANCED – DISABLE HARDWARE GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR.
      It worked for me and it saved messing with the registry – good luck.
      Roger

      Reply
  2. Margalbosh

    Thank you so much, I am writing Dissertation and I switched to Office 2013 with the hope of being faster but it was disaster. Now everything works perfect. Thanks a lot once more

    Reply
  3. draguscn

    I am in the middle of works too and have a disaster also .. thank you very much for this solution. My Office is now working faster, even than Office 2010.

    Reply
  4. Luigi

    This helped me out BIG TIME!!! I even started downloading all windows updates hoping that would fix it (I NEVER do windows updates)…. Thanks a mil!!!

    Reply
  5. Andy

    Wow, this sure sped it up. Office 2013 would freeze my computer when I simply tried to switch from “People” to “Calendar” view. Now my computer is usable again.

    Reply
  6. Yas

    Thanks a lot, it also solved my issue!

    However I’ve noticed that the first key I hit takes at least 3 seconds to come out and that every time I am using a new cell which tend to be irritating, during that time Excel is frozen. Any idea on why or maybe someone has the same issue?

    Best,

    Reply
  7. HT

    Awsome! Worked like a charm. Couldn’t even find this solution on Microsoft’s site with all the offshore support just telling us to uninstall and reinstall.

    Reply
  8. Waseem

    You are the savor, Thank you very much… I am struggling with office 2013 for more than 10 days and now its fixed with above suggestions. Thanks again, you rock !!!

    Reply
  9. Pingback: ITEA » Freezing/Slow Performance while using Office 2013 CP on Windows 7 SP1

  10. Owen Palmer

    Brilliant, worked for me on a Latitude laptop running Windows 7, and Office 2013. Primarily Word and Excel. I was told it was the autosave feature in Office… .that seemed to work until I did a Windows Update and then life was horrible.

    Downloaded free ‘RegMagik’ navigated to CURRENT_USER — Software — Microsoft — Office –15.0 — Common and then had to add Graphics as a New Key. Added the value DisableHardwareAcceleration with the number value of 1. Rebooted and hey presto, speed is loving and the freezing of office and constant use of task master has now stopped. Thanks again

    Reply
  11. Hanaeve89

    Thanks a lot. You’ve saved my life. I couldn’t do anything for a week and now everything works smoothly 😀

    Reply
  12. Anjay

    Thank you so much for the information. I’ve been looking for the solution for the last couple of weeks. Now, everything is working for me.

    Reply
  13. Fritz

    Hi,

    vielen Dank für den Tipp/thank you very much. Now my acer aspire 5739G with nvidia Geforce GT 240 M and directx11 has a new Office 2013 that finally doesn’t crash.

    Fritz

    Reply
  14. Paul

    It looks like this has also fixed my issue with a new Dell Latitude (W764 bit) and Office 2013 (32 Bit) with Office 365.

    We had tried complete uninstall and re-install worked for 5 days and then crashed again.

    The registry fix has fixed the issue.

    Thanks again

    Reply
  15. Jerry

    disabling the graphic accelerator definitely worked for me!

    i spent 3 hours trying many other manual fixes but this did it…thank you very much!

    Reply
  16. Brandon

    Hi and thank you finally someone could solve this issue perfect simple fix. I’m so very thankful.

    Reply
  17. Todd

    Just want to let you know that I just used this to fix my issues on Windows 10 with Office 365 (both latest versions). All office apps have been crashing on me since the last Windows update. Outlook wouldn’t even open for me. I had tried numerous Office repairs and other troubleshooting efforts. This is what finally fixed the problem for me. Thanks!

    Reply

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