Solved Excel 2019 freezing periodically

Hi.

I use Office 2019 at work and I have a bit of a problem with Excel. There are occasions when Excel will just freeze up. The following happens:

1. I lose the inability to type in a cell or on the menu bar
2. I am unable to save my work
3. The arrow keys will not move the highlight to a new cell, though the mouse can select it, but I am unable to modify the cell as in point #1
4. I cannot exit Excel and have to use Task manager to shut it down.
5. Reloading the file works fine. I can continue as normal, though I have lost anything since the last save.

I can edit the very same spreadsheets at home using Office 365 without issue, so it has to be something with the office PC. I am currently using an Intel system for it, but the same problem happened when I had my old AMD based system. (I used the same drive and just did a repair install when I moved to Intel. No other issues with the PC at all)

Is there a way to do a repair install with Office? I guess I could uninstall and reinstall if I can find my key, but that is the last ditch, nuclear option. I would rather find a fix for this freezing without reinstalling Office.

Specs for the machine affected:

Intel 13700K(F?)
Gigabyte Aorus AX Elite Wifi
DDR5 6000 RAM
ASUS RTX 4060 GPU
Windows 11 Pro 23H2

I hope that someone can shed some light on this.

Hi Catnip

There are troubleshooting steps below. I wouldn't use the assistant though that is your choice.

Excel not responding, hangs, freezes or stops working - Microsoft Support

I will give that a try. Many thanks @fishingfool

Well, it hasn't frozen since I did the troubleshooting, but it doesn't do it with a predictable rhythm.

I am going to mark this as solved. If it happens again, I will try the troubleshooting steps again and see what happens.

I am going to mark this as solved. If it happens again, I will try the troubleshooting steps again and see what happens.

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May the force be with you