How to use office 365’s troubleshooting tools to fix common problems

The world is changing quickly, and it’s all too easy for your business to fall behind the competition if you aren’t proactive. Fortunately, Microsoft Office 365 is a platform that helps your business keep pace in a mobile world. Here are five ways that Microsoft Office 365 can help your business:

Mobility

Whether you’re in the office, at an off-site meeting, or in an airport in a foreign country, you need to be able to connect with your business data. Letting time-sensitive concerns lapse because you were unreachable is no longer acceptable to clients. With Microsoft Office 365, you and your team can access all of your important contacts, emails, documents, and calendars from anywhere in the world. Whether on a mobile device, tablet, PC, or Mac, you’re always connected to what matters.

Adoption

Nothing is worse than investing in an expensive business application only to find your employees don’t use it. When you factor in training time and the associated loss of productivity as employees learn to switch over, is it even worth it? Office 365, on the other hand, is a platform that everyone already knows how to use. Apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are intuitive and user-friendly. Enjoy a smooth transition process and the benefit of easy adoption throughout your company.

Collaboration

With Office 365, it’s easier than ever for your team to share documents and projects. They can work together from anywhere and produce high-quality results faster than ever, with real-time tracking capabilities and collaborative features. Office 365 uses cloud technology to maximize productivity. Members of your team can be anywhere in the world, and they can collaborate as if they were in the same room.

Flexible Plans

Office 365 works as well for small businesses as it does for multinational corporations. Whether your company is heavily reliant on computers or just needs mobile management of contacts and documents, there is a plan that suits your needs. As your company grows and your technological demands increase, you can adjust to a bigger plan for a smooth and cost-effective transition.

Security

Microsoft Office 365 has built-in security measures to protect your valuable data against common attacks like malware, viruses, spam, and phishing schemes. Enjoy peace of mind knowing your business data is protected. Cloud storage means your data is safe from both external threats and physical hardware failure. Even if your physical infrastructure fails, as long as you are connected to the internet your team can access any and all data and keep the business going.

Empower your team and encourage collaboration by investing in Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365 is an extremely reliable service, with service availability that typically exceeds 99.9 percent. So if an occasional issue occurs with, for example, getting your email, you may not know where the difficulty lies. Is it your network connection? Has your colleague inadvertently removed your access to that shared mailbox? In these situations, wouldn’t it be nice if you had an automated assistant to help you troubleshoot—and resolve—the problem? Now, there is!

The Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 is an easy-to-use app that asks you some simple questions, tests for some of the most common Office 365 support issues and attempts to implement resolutions on your behalf. While the current version is focused on some the more common scenarios people encounter with Outlook, the Support and Recovery Assistant will gain new troubleshooting and resolution capabilities in the future. The Support and Recovery Assistant is built to automatically update itself as these new capabilities become available.

Getting the Support and Recovery Assistant

You can install the Support and Recovery Assistant by visiting diagnostics.outlook.com. Note that you’ll need to have administrator rights to install software on your computer.

Helping to grow and improve the Support and Recovery Assistant

As the last step in using this tool, you are asked to let us know if the Support and Recovery Assistant was able to resolve the problem, assign a rating to your experience and provide any feedback for how the tool could be improved. We carefully review these submissions and use this information to help prioritize new ways that the Support and Recovery Assistant can help find and fix issues.

For more information about the tool, please visit Fix Outlook account problems in Office 365 and watch the video and see some sample images from the app.

We encourage you to install the Support and Recovery Assistant, so that if you do run into an issue, your automated assistant is ready to help!

If you’re experiencing trouble with your Office 365 installation or issues with specific Office apps, Microsoft offers two automated tools that may be able to help you troubleshoot and repair your problems.

The first tool–the Office Repair wizard–is more limited in what it can do, but it’s available to all users of Office 365 Home or Business. The second tool–the Office 365 Support and Recovery Assistant–is much like the old Office Diagnostics tool you may remember from Office 2007. It covers more problems and hooks into online support resources better, but unfortunately is only available to users of Office 365 Business.

All Office 365 Users: Repair an Office Installation from the Control Panel

Whether you’re using Office 365 Home or Business, you can try to repair an Office 365 installation by re-running its Setup program from the Control Panel. It isn’t as good at solving specific problems–especially with Outlook–as the troubleshooting tool that business owners can use, but it is good at helping to resolve installation problems and often for fixing individual Office programs that won’t start or keep crashing on you. It can also help resolve issues that poorly-written add-ins can sometimes cause.

You can choose one of two options when you perform a repair:

• Quick Repair. This type of repair goes pretty quickly, but it only tries to detect and replace any corrupt files in your Office installation–similarly to what the System File Checker tool does for Windows.
• Online Repair. This type of repair actually uninstalls and reinstalls Office. It takes longer to run and requires an internet connection, but it performs a more complete repair job.

The online repair option is pretty good about keeping your preferences in place–and it won’t affect any of your documents–but we recommend trying the quick repair first and then using the online repair if your problem isn’t resolved.

Before you get started, go ahead and save any open Office documents and then close all your Office programs. When you’re ready, click Start, type “Control Panel,” and then hit Enter or click the result.

In the Control Panel window, click the “Uninstall a program” link.

In the Programs and Features window, select your Office 365 installation from the list and then click “Change” to open the repair wizard.

Select whether you want to run a quick or online repair and then click “Next.” For this example, we’re going to be running a quick repair, but the process is pretty much the same no matter which option you pick.

Click “Repair” to start the repair process.

The wizard will close any Office programs that are still open and will then begin scanning for and replacing corrupted files. It should only take a few minutes. When it’s done, click “Close.”

You can now test your Office apps to see if your problem has been fixed. If you’re still having issues after running a quick repair, go ahead and try the more thorough online repair. It will take some time, since it has to uninstall Office and re-download the installation, but it should get you fixed up if the quick repair doesn’t.

If you’re experiencing trouble with your Office 365 installation or issues with specific Office apps, Microsoft offers two automated tools that may be able to help you troubleshoot and repair your problems.

The first tool–the Office Repair wizard–is more limited in what it can do, but it’s available to all users of Office 365 Home or Business. The second tool–the Office 365 Support and Recovery Assistant–is much like the old Office Diagnostics tool you may remember from Office 2007. It covers more problems and hooks into online support resources better, but unfortunately is only available to users of Office 365 Business.

All Office 365 Users: Repair an Office Installation from the Control Panel

Whether you’re using Office 365 Home or Business, you can try to repair an Office 365 installation by re-running its Setup program from the Control Panel. It isn’t as good at solving specific problems–especially with Outlook–as the troubleshooting tool that business owners can use, but it is good at helping to resolve installation problems and often for fixing individual Office programs that won’t start or keep crashing on you. It can also help resolve issues that poorly-written add-ins can sometimes cause.

You can choose one of two options when you perform a repair:

• Quick Repair. This type of repair goes pretty quickly, but it only tries to detect and replace any corrupt files in your Office installation–similarly to what the System File Checker tool does for Windows.
• Online Repair. This type of repair actually uninstalls and reinstalls Office. It takes longer to run and requires an internet connection, but it performs a more complete repair job.

The online repair option is pretty good about keeping your preferences in place–and it won’t affect any of your documents–but we recommend trying the quick repair first and then using the online repair if your problem isn’t resolved.

Before you get started, go ahead and save any open Office documents and then close all your Office programs. When you’re ready, click Start, type “Control Panel,” and then hit Enter or click the result.

In the Control Panel window, click the “Uninstall a program” link.

In the Programs and Features window, select your Office 365 installation from the list and then click “Change” to open the repair wizard.

Select whether you want to run a quick or online repair and then click “Next.” For this example, we’re going to be running a quick repair, but the process is pretty much the same no matter which option you pick.

Click “Repair” to start the repair process.

The wizard will close any Office programs that are still open and will then begin scanning for and replacing corrupted files. It should only take a few minutes. When it’s done, click “Close.”

You can now test your Office apps to see if your problem has been fixed. If you’re still having issues after running a quick repair, go ahead and try the more thorough online repair. It will take some time, since it has to uninstall Office and redownload the installation, but it should get you fixed up if the quick repair doesn’t.

Office 365 Business Users: Troubleshoot Using the Support and Recovery Assistant

The Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 is a relatively new troubleshooting tool you can download from Microsoft. Right now, it’s only available for users of Office 365 Business. Office 365 Home users can download and run it, but one of the last steps of the troubleshooter is to sign in with your business account. Still, if you are a business user, it can be a valuable tool.

While its primary focus is on Outlook issues right now, it can help also identify and resolve problems with installation and activation of Office 365. Plus, if it’s like most Microsoft troubleshooters, you can expect it to add more functionality over time. For right now, though, it can help you with problems like:

• Basic Outlook issues, such as when Outlook–for Windows or Mac–stops responding or receiving emails, won’t remember your passwords, or cannot connect to shared mailboxes and calendars.
• Syncing problems with Office 365 on your mobile device.
• Trouble setting up Outlook on the web.
• Difficulty with Exchange Online.

Start by downloading and installing the Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365. Run the program on the machine where you’re experiencing the problem, accept the licensing terms, and you’ll arrive at the main page where you can begin selecting the issue you’re having. For this example, we’re going to run through troubleshooting a startup problem with Outlook, but the basic process is the same no matter what problem you’re having.

Select the issue, use the steps in the troubleshooter to help narrow down that issue, and then let the troubleshooter try to fix it. On this first screen, choose the basic area you’re having difficulties and then click “Next.”

On the next page, select the specific problem you’re having and then click “Next.”

The troubleshooter needs to run on the machine where you’re having trouble, so tell it “Yes” and then click “Next.”

At this point, you’ll need to sign in with your Office 365 Business account to proceed. Just type in your credentials and click “Next.”

The troubleshooter will attempt to locate and fix whatever problem you specified. The troubleshooter can fix most problems automatically. Occasionally, it may run into a problem that it needs you to take steps to fix, such as when Outlook needs to be updated.

If the troubleshooter is successful, you can go ahead and try your program again to see if it works. If the troubleshooter reports that it cannot fix your problem and has no suggestions for you to try yourself, it will ask whether it can record the steps you take while you reproduce the problem so that it can send those steps to Microsoft for review.

As companies made the migration to Microsoft 365 this year, many Exchange admins found that their collection of troubleshooting tools for on-premises Exchange Server don’t always work well — or even at all — with Outlook in Office 365. Fortunately, our Exchange expert Edward van Biljon lets you know about several new diagnostic tools that are made for Microsoft 365. This article, first published in November, was a lifesaver for many IT pros, and that is why it is one of TechGenix’s 20 Best for 2020.

As Exchange admins, we have dealt with our fair share of Outlook problems that occur on users’ machines. For those who have migrated to Microsoft 365, it’s good to know that troubleshooting can still be done because of the number of diagnostic tools available. And that’s a good thing — there are a number of things that can go wrong. Here are some of them:

• Outlook won’t start
• OST file corrupt
• PST file won’t open
• Outlook starts and then quits
• Plugins that cause Outlook to stop responding
• Many other errors

Common Microsoft 365 troubleshooting issues

When it comes to Office 365 (or, as it’s now called, Microsoft 365), the Outlook issues are still there, albeit maybe on a lesser scale. But there are a few Microsoft 365 errors that are pretty common and need troubleshooting. These include:

• Outlook not starting
• Cannot send or receive email in Outlook
• Outlook profile won’t connect on your machine
• Other errors

When you run into issues with Exchange on-premises, sometimes there is something on the server itself that needs to be fixed. If clients cannot connect to Outlook, you need to check if the Microsoft Information Store Service is started or running, does the server have enough resources or has it hit backpressure and caused email to stop flowing, or is that file server with the PST files on not accessible and causing issues with users’ Outlook? As you can see, troubleshooting and resolving on-premises Exchange might be easier than Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant

If your mailboxes are in the cloud, what do you do if Outlook won’t connect? You obviously cannot log in to the server and check the Microsoft Information Store as you don’t have access to the Exchange environment. You would need to log a call with Microsoft to check and get advice. Microsoft has actually made it easier for you to troubleshoot with a tool available called Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. What can this tool do for you? Here are three main Microsoft 365 troubleshooting features it can assist you with:

• Outlook not starting
• Can’t send or receive email
• Outlook won’t connect from your desktop/laptop

I have used this tool a number of times, and it has fixed the issue with Outlook 99.9 percent of the time. Yes, there will be that 0.1 percent where you do need to log a call with Microsoft. When you download the application, it will ask you to download a 25MB+ file and install it. You may think you have a bad installer as nothing happens for about one minute before you are presented with the screen below:

Once you have read the services agreement (some people do read it!), you can click on “I agree” to proceed or “Cancel” to quit the application. Once you click “I Agree,” a new window will open as shown below:

On this page, you have the option to either leave the default on “No” and click “Cancel,” if you click “Yes,” you will notice the Next button will become available:

Click “Next” to continue. What the tool will do is check if Outlook is running. If it isn’t, you will receive a warning and you can continue. Once you continue, the tool will actually check the profile and then give you a report at the end and the next steps. If you quit the tool halfway and open it again, you will now notice that you have a whole lot more options available to you as shown below:

This is pretty cool as you can select an option that you are having an issue with. If you notice I selected Outlook and below that, it says “Resolve over 10 different problems.” If you click “Next,” you will be shown a list and you can now select the problem you are having. Below is an example of this:

Common issues

One of the common issues is that Outlook stops responding or freezes and this can be due to antivirus or a plugin that might not be compatible with Outlook. When new items are added to the tool, it will show “New” next to that item. Microsoft Teams meeting option is new. If you click an item, you can then click “Next” and you will be taken back to the beginning again where it will ask you if this is the affected machine. Once you select “Yes” and then click “Next,” the tool will start troubleshooting the issue. Here is a window you will see:

You will notice in the window above when running it live that it will start showing what it has found. If you are not running an Office version that is supported, you will be presented with this window:

This troubleshooting tool is obviously looking for a Microsoft 365 version of Office. In this case, I was running Office 2019 retail version, but you get the gist of it. To wrap up, you can see that Microsoft has made this tool to make it easier for admins in their Microsoft 365 troubleshooting. The tool is obviously limited in what it can try to fix. If you run into an issue that does require support from the Microsoft team itself, the tool will be a great help in gathering the logs you can use during the call.

Microsoft 365 troubleshooting: Every situation is different

The tool will advise you to update your version of Office to the latest version and then try again. Sometimes an update does assist in fixing an issue and other times not. Every machine is different as people run different flavors of antivirus or have Group Policy that locks the machine down.

Technical Level : Expert

When users report that they aren’t getting email, it can be frustratingly hard to find what’s wrong. You might run through several troubleshooting scenarios in your mind. Is something wrong with Outlook? Is the Office 365 service down? Is there a problem with mail flow or spam filter settings? Or is the problem due to something that’s entirely outside your control, like the sender is on a global block list?

Fortunately, Office 365 provides powerful automated tools that can help you find and fix a variety of problems quickly and easily.

Check the Service Health Dashboard

To make sure there is no service outages, check the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard. As an Office 365 admin, you can see whether there has been a service interruption or outage in your service. The Service health page shows status information for today, the past six days, and 30 days of history.

Use the Support and Recovery Assistant tool for individual users

If a user in your organization is having trouble receiving email, it could be due to a licensing issue, a profile problem, the wrong version of Outlook, or a mix of other issues. Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 finds and helps you fix most issues. As a first step in troubleshooting email delivery problems for Office 365 for business, we recommend that you download and run Support and Recovery Assistant on the affected machine:

Use administrator tools to fix email delivery problems

If the Support and Recovery Assistant tool doesn’t resolve the issue, you can run the Mail Flow Troubleshooter tool as an Admin. You’ll answer a few questions, and then the tool will scan your Office 365 configuration to help identify mail flow issues in your environment.

In July 2019, I bought a new computer and with it Windows 10 Pro and Office 365 Home. I used the Office 365 version of Outlook for my hotmail email account. I had a few connected accounts (gmail accounts) and recently received messages from Microsoft Outlook that “It looks like we don’t have permission to get email for . (at)gmail.com“. That came with a set of instructions on how to fix it, which I finally did on 2020-02-02 directly in Outlook.com ( not in the Office version of Outlook; it did not work there, the instructions referred to the account directly in Outlook.com).

But this seemed to have brought on a problem with all of Office 365 because ever since that incident (although it’s been fixed since 2020-02-02, i.e. the connected accounts have all been deleted in Outlook.com) I get a warning rectangle right next to my login information on top of the document in Word and Excel (after about 15 minutes, not right away) and clicking on it brings up the error message:

“Sorry, we can’t get to your account right now. To fix it please sign in again.” If I click on “Sign in“, I land on my Microsoft account page and that’s it. That account looks fine, everything I bought from MS is there, payment is up to date, no error messages there.

After another few minutes, Word puts me in that holding pattern looking for something “Just a moment (or something to this effect) and then the following error message pops up:

“Something went wrong. Please try again later. 0x800705b4. Send feedback“.

That was also the message I got in Office 365 Outlook. And when I clicked on ” Send feedback “, I was routed to a login page and when I entered my login account information, it prompted me to log in with a school or work account. I don’t have a school or work account!! I only have a personal account with Microsoft.

That is why today I did not click on “Send feedback”.

I checked the internet for that error code above, 0x800705b4, and found a few older conversations in the Microsoft Community and this suggestion dated November 8, 2018, by Zixuan Yuan MSFT:

” Could you please try the following suggestions to clean the credential and sign in again to see the outcome?

1. File>Account>under User Information, sign out all the existing account (optional) and exit all Office apps.
2. Control Panel>User Accounts>credential manager>Windows Credentials, remove all Office 365 credentials that look like: MicrosoftOfficeXXData:XXXXXXXXX
3. Right click windows icon>Run>type “regedit” then press ENTER to open the registry editor. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity, delete the whole Identity folder. (Please back up it before you delete it.)
4. Restart computer and sign in again to see the outcome.”

Is this still up to date? Is this what I should do? Also, should I back up the registry as described under the link referred to in the message above? Is that also still up to date?

Thank you very much for helping me with this. As a freelance translator, I do need Word on a daily basis and can’t accept jobs without it. Thanks!

A colleague of mine recently solved one of the biggest pain points I have dealt with regarding Office365 – that is, Microsoft’s seemingly hit-or-miss modern authentication.

Symptoms look like this:
1. Outlook client can’t connect and/or authenticate for end-users
2. Turning on Azure MFA for an end-user ruins their life (and yours) because all office applications, teams, etc. break.
3. Admins have an impending sense of “dread” when setting up systems for new users because 80% of the time they are going to spend hours sorting out the above issues.
4. You call Microsoft Support complaining of these issues and they are eventually stumped and tell you to rebuild the desktop/laptop from scratch… great for end-users that deal with this issue 1 year into the job and rather like their systems as-is… -or- MS Support tells you to pop a registry key into the end-user’s system which just disables Modern Authentication all together – which may fix Outlook but leaves many many other things broken…

If any of that sounds familiar, I highly recommend you read the article he published on linked-in…. this is THE SILVER BULLET to end your Microsoft Authentication woes: Solving Modern Authentication Issues with Office 365

I also document fixes like this here so this is the powershell that he wrote up to run on end-user systems experiencing these issues (stolen from article, all credit goes there)…

If that returns NOTHING then there is your issue… So proceed to run this:

Then – if you did the thing (per MS support) where you added that registry key to disable Modern Auth… undo that and then clear cached credentials…

Once the above has all been run… Office365 authentication woes magically disappear and Azure MFA starts working… for everything.

My friend also provided this solution to Microsoft Support (in full) and they thanked him so hopefully other people won’t continue wrestling with this issue because support can NOW provide the right answer. (there are LOTS of people dealing with this right now…)

I have an Office 365 license, and it’s still definitely valid and very much paid for, but Excel didn’t seem to think that was the case when I went to open the app.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy fix to the problem that doesn’t involve contacting Microsoft and yelling at anyone on the phone.

How to fix Microsoft Office 365 subscription problems

Here’s what you should do to resolve the issue:

Right-click on the Start button.

Select apps and features.

Click modify.

Click repair.

In some cases, errors can be fixed with the quick repair option, but when a license comes into play you need to go online to ensure everything syncs back up correctly.

Office will now download whatever files and data it needs to repair itself. Once the process is complete, fire up the misbehaving application again. You should no longer see an error message stopping you from being productive like a boss!

More Windows 10 resources

For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources:

We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.

Why World of Warcraft players are leaving for Final Fantasy 14

Is World of Warcraft about to suffer another cataclysm? Let’s explore some of the main reasons WoW players are actively jumping ship, seeking greener MMO pastures.

Why Steam Deck will be better than Steam Machines

Valve’s Switch-like Steam Deck looks incredibly promising, but many are worried that it will flop like Valve’s Steam Machine consoles did. Here’s why we think the Steam Deck will be different (and better).

The second half of July is packed with new games for Xbox Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass just revealed its list of new games heading to the service in the second half of July, and it’s filled with games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Battlefield V, The Ascent, and much more.

Which Norton 360 tier is right for you?

A powerful antivirus solution coupled with some advanced protection makes Norton 360 a great security option with lots of tiers from which to choose.