Forum Discussion
Excel freezes when displaying graphics on a 4K-monitor
I have an issue with Excel (Office16) on Windows 11 when connected to a monitor with 4K-resolution. Here is one way to reproduce the issue:
1. Start a new document
2. In column A, create a series of some 100 data points, e.g. numbers 1 to 100
3. Select the data series and insert a 2D line chart showing the data series
4. Go down to the bottom of the series, i.e. cell A100
5. Press CTRL+Home to go back to the top.
Now, the chart will not be seen. All my 16 GB RAM will be occupied. My harddisk will start caching tens of GBs of data. I will need to kill Excel from the Task Manager. This has been reproduced on two identical laptops with AMD Ryzen Pro 7 CPU, and one Intel-based laptop. The problem only occurs when an external monitor is connected, and the resolution is set to 4K.
Another way to create the same rush in memory is the following:
1. Start a new Excel document
2. Insert the beating heart from Insert / 3D models / All Animated Models
3. Scroll down in the document to make the graphics go out of the screen
4. Scroll back to the top
Now the same memory rush will start. I can insert the same 3D model in Word and PowerPoint without any issues. The problem must be related to Excel.
How do I get this information to Microsoft without starting paid support?
13 Replies
- For those of you still facing this problem, here is what helped me:
(For Win 10)
Go to Settings > System > Display > Select the relevant monitor > Advanced Scaling Settings > Switch "Let Windows try to fix apps so they're not blurry" to ON
This fixed all my issues, but with one caveat - the default cell sizes changed from 20x64 pixels to 29x96. However, I'd rather deal with resizing every time than not being able to work on the program. Hope this helps 🙂 I just want to also add that I have the exact same issue, and this is particularly recent as I used Excel on 4k monitors for a couple years. I find it difficult to replicate, but it happens most often when switching tabs on Excel. I have spent the last week trying to pinpoint the issue. I have done the following:
- Uninstall and reinstall
- O365 “Repair Installation” - Online mode
- Safe mode
- Fully re-built the registry for Excel
I have a 16 core CPU, 64 GB of RAM, and a 3080 GPU. It's almost funny to see Excel chew through 64 GB of RAM to change tabs.
If I change my screen to 1080p, it performs infinitely better, and I have not seen the visual glitching. Given this, it seems like it's a 4k focused glitch, which led me here.
- aforatmosphere: Can you reproduce the issue in any of the ways I describe above?
- I'm not exactly able to reproduce the problem the way you describe. I have yet to find a common way in which to reproduce it, but it most often happens when switching tabs.
I finally found a way to fix it for myself without moving to 1080p, which is to roll back the Geforce driver to 512.65 from 516.59. This mostly resolved my problems, and I found someone else with the same problem on NVidia's forums (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/496299/geforce-grd-51659-feedback-thread-released-62822/). If you don't have an Nvidia graphics card, we probably have separate problems.
