
Reinstalling Office with the online ‘Click to Run’ setup means you’ll get the latest version/build of Office which is what you were trying to do with the update. In other words after reinstalling Office you should be right back where you were before the Office troubles started.

If you uninstall Office then reinstall all your settings are preserved, including Office ‘Insider’ status, if any. The good news is that settings and account details are retained after a standard uninstall of Office 365 or Office 2019. Experienced Office users have learnt to skip the two repair choices and jump straight to uninstall/reinstall. If the two repair options don’t help, you need to go ‘all the way’ and uninstall Office 365 / 2019 then reinstall it.įrankly, the two ‘repair’ options don’t seem to help much with update problems. You might be wondering why a failed update doesn’t automatically trigger one of the Repair options? It’s just one of the unexplained mysteries of Office install and update. Online Repair is a more extensive check and fix system.Īfter Online Repair is done, again try updating Office. This checks for some obvious problems and, hopefully, fixes them.Īfter Quick Repair is done, try updating Office again. Select Microsoft Office from the Programs and Features list then click Change, after the admin prompt there are the Office repair options. Office repair options are available from Control Panel | Programs and Features then scroll down to Microsoft Office (365/2019 etc). Try these in order, after each one try updating Office again. One of these three repair steps will fix the vast majority of problems. Some people get Office update to work simply by restarting the computer. There’s no fixed value but anything less than 5GB of free disk space could be a problem. Also try …Ĭheck there’s enough free disk space. The speed doesn’t matter much but the connection can’t drop out too often.Īs a very rough ‘rule of thumb’, if you can stream video from YouTube, Netflix etc without trouble then your internet connection should be more than enough for Office install or update. Still, best to check your internet access is working and stable. Common Office update error messages often mention ‘downloading updates’ as the problem but often that’s simply not true.

Office ‘Click to Run’ updates need an Internet connection. See “Something went wrong” fixing a bad Office 365 update

The error message is often misleading and the error code is non-specific. The error messages on Office 365/2019 setup and update are notoriously unhelpful, so here’s a guide to fixing Office install or update problems that work out here in the real world.Įrror messages like the infamous ‘Something went wrong” should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
