Excel grey and black boxes on secondary display

Question

My secondary screen doesn't display Excel properly: it has gray, black and white boxes and lines everywhere.
As I scroll up and down, or zoom in and out, the boxes disappear and and then reappear in different places.
I have tried upgrading from Excel 2013 to Excel 2016, but the issue is the same.

^{(Click image to enlarge)}

Laptop: Dell XPS 13, Intel HD 520
Monitor: Dell U27"

Solution 1

Reinstall Office.

I had the same problem - only visible with MS Excel and no other programs. Areas that are blacked out would shift on scrolling but never go away unless window was reduced in size and zoomed in. This made it impossible to work on large spreadsheets.

My hardware includes Dell XPS15 9550 with TB15 thunderbolt 3 dock and 34" dell 4k monitor. Right from first install the problem occurred (see screenshot below) and Microsoft help was no help at all - no suggestions after an hour on chat with remote desktop access with the help dept. Very frustrating!

I updated all Dell drivers and video card drivers with no improvement. Tried reinstalling Office 365 twice with no improvement.

Then I reinstalled Office 2016 Professional Plus and the problem disappeared.

Subsequently worked with Office 365 Std as well. I can only conclude it must have been some form of corrupted file during the download/install process? Very odd and took a lot of time to find the solution.

Solution 2

I was also having the same problem and discovered it is an issue with the scaling. If you click on properties on the excel shortcut and check the disable scaling for high DPI displays, the boxes disappear. The GUI elements won't be the right size, but at least it's more usable.

Solution 3

Have a Lenovo 910 512GB with 16GB, 4K monitor

We have tried everything to correct this issue, 2 IT guys and MS Tech Support. We believe that MS Excel doesn't play nice with 4K monitors.

When running Excel in Safe Mode, we found that the issue resolved. It is our understanding that Safe Mode disables add-ons and runs in VGA mode. Disabling Add-Ons helped a little. However, running the entire system in VGA (Safe Mode) corrected the issue.

Obviously, we are not going to run in Safe Mode. I have decided to live with this announce until MS updates their software to work with 4K monitors properly.

I hope that this helps.

Solution 4

I ran into this issue as well and posted to /r/Excel.

I eventually contacted Microsoft support and was told to do the following. These steps fixed my issues.

Go to the Control Panel and run Online Repair:

1. Windows Key + X
2. Click Programs and Features (first option)
3. Right-click Microsoft Office > Change > Online Repair

The support tech's explanation was that MS Office (Specifically Excel) was corrupted and that caused the rendering issues.

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Comments

[Raystafarian]

Does it happen with other office products? What if you switch the displays?

[Burgi]

Have you done a graphics driver update?

[magicandre1981]

disable HW acceleration in Excel options if updating the GPU drivers doesn't fix it

[Gigi]

It only happens with MS excel and no other product

[Gigi]

Disabling HW acceleration doesn't change anything

[Gigi]

Hi, I also have a USB-C to DVI adapter to connect the second display. Do you think this could be linked?

[Brad]

I came across a registry change that may resolve the issue using a manifest configuration file to override the display settings on an executable. appuals.com/…

[Guy de Carufel]

For me it started happening right after Dell Update. I rolled back my nvidia driver and that solved it.

[Ramhound]

Which line exactly?