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Tim_Hill2190's avatar
Tim_Hill2190
Copper Contributor
Sep 25, 2020
Solved

Excel freezes when formatting cells

When I try to format a cell in Excel - bolding, underlining, switching font size - the program freezes and I need to re-start.  Is a new issue from last 2 days having worked without problems previous...
excel
office 365
  • Emiru's avatar
    Emiru
    Dec 30, 2020
    This may sound ridiculously simple, but try to change your default printer to PDF. I have suffered from the same problem and this helped instantly.
Emiru's avatar
Emiru
Brass Contributor
Dec 30, 2020
This may sound ridiculously simple, but try to change your default printer to PDF. I have suffered from the same problem and this helped instantly.
LuciePen's avatar
LuciePen
Copper Contributor
Oct 01, 2022

I have a similar issue - Excel crashing when trying to format or print. It also crashes when I copy/paste from Word, websites, or any other source except another Excel file or Notepad. Word crashes too, but only if I try to print. This has been going on for two months, and after trying everything under the sun, I gave up and have just been working around the bug.

 

I found this thread today and tried restarting the spooler service and setting the default printer as PDF (I had to do it in Windows settings, since Excel crashed as soon as I clicked the Print options). Sadly, it has not solved the problem for me

 

EDIT: Since posting the above, I tried stopping the printer spooler, and BINGO! Excel was working again! I could format and copy/paste - yay! Sadly, the spooler restarts whenever I restart the computer, even after I set start-up to "Disabled" in Services. It's still a band-aid and not a cure. It means I have to stop the spooler every time I want to use Excel, and then I can't print. I'd love to know why this is happening, and if there's a way to fix it.

😞

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