Microsoft Word/Excel is trying to recover your information - constant message in file explorer

Hello,

Welcome to Microsoft Community and thank you for posting your query.

You may repair Office suite using the following link and check if opening Office attachments works as expected.

https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Repair-an-Office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b

If issue persist, you may start the computer in clean boot mode and then try to open Office 2016 application and verify the status.

Starting the computer in clean boot mode would disable all the non-Microsoft applications and the antivirus, which could be one of the reasons for the error.

Refer the article below to start the computer in clean boot.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Disclaimer: Ensure to restart the computer in normal mode after completing the troubleshooting steps.

Hope this information helps. Please feel free to reply in case you face any other issues with Microsoft Office in future. 

Thank you.

Thank you. 

I have performed the first step, but I still have the same issues. I have read the document regarding the clean boot, but there are no instructions relating to Windows 10. Should i use the windows 8 guide?

I tried the clean boot and nothing solved the problem there either. 

However, what I did discover that sort of solved the problem was turning the 'preview pane' off in file explorer. By not having to access the file for the preview I stopped getting this error message. This is not really a solution as I should be able to use the preview pane, but stops it being annoying for the time being. 

Any advice on what might be causing the preview pane not to work like this?

Thanks

Irving

I am having the same problem and also discovered that disabling the preview pane prevents the dialog from showing up (and bogging my system down).  

Furthermore, the preview pane in Windows 10 seems to be preventing me from deleting files if they are or even have been in the preview pane since booting.  

Rant: Since this does not seem to happen all the time, I suspect Microsoft is relying on some type of garbage collection algorithm to eliminate the memory and file handles associated with the view, and you just have to wait for Windows to decide it is time to process the garbage collection.  (This is a crutch modern programmers are being taught to use as an alternative to clean programming practices - I call it programming hygene.)  Having not seen the code, this is only my professional suspicion, but Microsoft needs to take a look at the issue.

Hello,

Welcome to Microsoft Community and thank you for posting your query.

You may repair Office suite using the following link and check if opening Office attachments works as expected.

https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Repair-an-Office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b

If issue persist, you may start the computer in clean boot mode and then try to open Office 2016 application and verify the status.

Starting the computer in clean boot mode would disable all the non-Microsoft applications and the antivirus, which could be one of the reasons for the error.

Refer the article below to start the computer in clean boot.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Disclaimer: Ensure to restart the computer in normal mode after completing the troubleshooting steps.

Hope this information helps. Please feel free to reply in case you face any other issues with Microsoft Office in future. 

Thank you.

I have tried both starting in clean boot mode and repairing office, and I am still having the same issue. Much like how the other users said, it is incredibly annoying to receive that message whenever I use Word or Excel.  Can we expect an actual fix anytime soon?

I have had this problem too:

I upgraded from Office 2013 to 2016 under HUP on a win 7 machine. I then uninstalled 2016 as it was such a pain. Reinstalled 2013 and it had the same issues as 2016. So I would say the 2016 installer is to blame. I then tried the MS uninstall tool which did not even recognise the office installations (2013 or 2016). I tried repairing it using the full repair click to install for 2013, that did not work. I eventually manually uninstalled office 2013 and 2016 and then reinstalled 2016......still the same crash every time you click on a file to preview. It also crashes at will when using the package. I then installed win 10 to see if that would repair the issue and again there is no change. finally I did a click to run repair of win 2016. still no change.

To describe this in full if you click on a excel file .xls or .xlsx with the preview pane on  you get a message saying that Microsoft excel is trying to recover your information... this happens without fail every time. 

If you then double click to open the file opens but you get another warning... Microsoft excel has stopped working 

windows is checking for a solution to the problem. This BTW comes up at the same time as another instance of the same

This has gone form an annoyance to something that stops productivity as nothing will happen while these crash dumps are being prepared.

I have Norton IS... turning that off does nothing to either of these crashes. 

Before I installed MSO 2016 MSO 2013 worked fine so  as far as I can make out the MSO 2016 installer (from Disc) breaks something and that something is not reversed by uninstalling (automatically or manually) and it is not fixed by any form of repair.

Note that switching off the preview pane in win 10 stops both crashes and MSO 2016 appears to work well.

I know that there are more people out there that have this issue but when you search in Google for the preview term it brings up Preview versions of MSO. Only when you use the search terms Preview pane does it bring you here, so that may be why it seems less prevalent. Also as you can still use the software I think this bug will be under-reported.

I am happy to work with you to fix the issue but generic posts and links are unlikely to help.