If Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) is misbehaving, try the Repair option. If that’s also causing trouble, there’s a hidden command prompt option.
For any ‘Click to Run’ installations of Office for Windows (mostly Microsoft 365, Office 2019) there are Repair options available to fix common problems.
Among these troubles are an Office program won’t start properly or is missing from Start menu. It’s something worth trying before calling support or checking online for help.
Go to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Change to see the Repair options.
Quick Repair – does a fast pass over your system to make sure the basics are correct. No internet connection required.
Online Repair – try this is the quick option doesn’t help. It’s a more thorough check which can download replacement files if necessary.
Command Prompt options
All that’s great but sometimes you can’t reach that repair dialog box.
Never fear, there’s another way to run the Office repair options via the Command Prompt (often still called a DOS box).
First you need to find OfficeClickToRun.exe on your computer. Most likely it’s at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\ which is the default location for Microsoft 365 64-bit.
For 32-bit Office it’ll be under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office 15\ or similar.
Open a Command Prompt with administrator access.
A command line like this will open the Repair dialog shown above.
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\OfficeClicktoRun.exe” scenario=Repair platform=x64 culture=en-us DisplayLevel=True
Change the Platform to =x86 if running Office 32-bit.
Change the culture setting to match your language. For example en-US en-GB en-AU en-NZ fr-FR fr-CA see here for a full list.
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