Office 2016 problems

After many months of Office 2016 being available on Office 365 to some customers, it was finally added to mine and I finally upgraded around 2 months ago.

With a single exception being a really nice feature in Outlook where the attach file button shows the most recently edited files, I have yet to see any killer feature or improvement in day to day usage.

To start, my start menu keeps losing associations with all the Office programs.

Doing a repair install seems to fix this temporarily, but, give it a few hours and it breaks again.

The biggest annoyance I have at the moment is that Excel and Word just seem to be so buggy - it is unreal.

I have been trying to do various accounting work for the past 2 days involving having two spreadsheets open. I worked for 2 hours, making various marks on the spreadsheet - and when I clicked save, absolutely nothing happened.

I then tried to highlight to do copy and I got a weird out of memory warning (despite having ~40% free on a 16GB system). I tried so many things, but, it was, in official terms "buggered". Upon restarting, the worst thing was there was no auto recovery.

This has unfortunately happened so many times now that whenever I am doing work, I find myself saving a lot more often than I previously used to (after each row sometimes) and just restart the moment I see an error.

I wish I could say it was a failed installation, but, I have the same on my home machine and two of my laptops (I don't use any out of the ordinary add-ons).

There was an Office 365 addon today - running it fixed the file associations for about 6 hours - but, they are broken again and I have already had the Excel bug a few minutes ago.

It was a very similar bug (freeze on saving) that got me to leave my year long experiment with OpenOffice many years ago - I wonder how that or Libre Office is coming along?! I just can't put up with this much longer - or, maybe I should just go back to Office 2013.

Years on, I've sold so many Office licensing deals to companies because it is the right thing to do from an IT standpoint (deployment/growth etc. is so much easier), but, the IT cynic in me wonders if people are just best off buying boxed copies/OEM with the huge release cycle Microsoft seem to have - and how lackluster the improvements seem to be in every version.

... Still waiting for the version of Word that can type a dissertation or other long document for you!