Repairing Office/ Office is busy

Fix for “Office is Busy” and Office repair doesn’t work.  I had this issue on several computers and then found this fix.  It made Office run quicker and the annoying “Office is Busy” messages stopped.

Open any of the Office programs (Word, Excel, etc.).  Go to the File Tab, then find “Account” and click on this.  On the right side of the screen, your should see “Office Updates” shown with a box to the left of the title.  If you click on “Update Options” select “Turn off Updates”.

No more “Office is Busy” messages and no more slow responding Office windows.

<snip> I have been having this problem, as well.  While performing an installation repair operation has worked for me, it has taken a lot of time, and requires closing and re-opening all of my Office applications.  A post on another thread mentioned a better solution that has worked for me: Simply stop or restart the “Microsoft Office Service”. 

1.   You can do this by using the Control Panel >  Services applet.  Find the service name in the list

2.   Right click on the service name

3.   Select Properties

4.   Click on the stop button, wait to see a message that the service has been stopped

5.   Click on the start button

 It seems to have resolved the problem within seconds, and it is much less disruptive (though not nearly as nice as a real fix for the problem).  I hope this helps. </snip>

Note: another person reported they had to turn the service on and off a few times before it worked.

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Another way to get to the Service dialog,

1.   open “File Explorer”,

2.   Right Click on “Computer”,

3.   Click on “Manage”.

4.   When Computer Management panel opens double click on “Services and Applications”

5.   then click “Services”.

6.   scroll down until you find “Microsoft Office Service”.

7.   Right click on it then click “Restart”.

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One person reported that they have to restart the service every time after booting the computer.

In that situation, it may be easiest to create a batch file to issue the commands.  Then you can put it on your desktop or task bar to have quick access to run it as required.  The brain dead simplest form of this .BAT file would be:

but it is better if you do some error checking to make sure you know what is going on if there are any problems. This page has a detailed batch file you can use as a template:

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-xp/831463-batch-script-restart-service.html

This page describes the whole process of creating a simple batch file: http://lifehacker.com/5645770/create-service+stopping-batch-files-to-optimize-your-pc-for-specific-tasks

This link goes into more detail: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/133883/stop-and-start-a-service-via-batch-or-cmd-file

http://www.aspnet-answers.com/microsoft/WSH/31708197/net-start-return-codes.aspx

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Another reported fix:

<snip> As it turned out, I used system restore to an earlier time (two days before the “we’re sorry” message) and MS. Word came back just fine. Soon after, I was advised an update was available, so I clicked to allow. MS Word has been working perfectly ever since. 

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