Users of Microsoft Office (2013) are facing from time to time a crude issue: The rendering seems broken in Office apps after updating the Microsoft Office package. Addendum: The workaround I describes also helps for other rendering issues caused by some Office updates in several Microsoft Office version.
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Description of this issue
I stumbled upon this within this German forum. An administrator is using Microsoft Office 2013 under Windows 10, all patches are installed. But the Office modules shows rendering issues (black bars, fonts are broken and some lines are shifted – see screenshot below).
(Source: administrator.de)
The user repaired and re-installed Microsoft Office 2013, without success. Also updating the graphics driver didn't changed a thing. There is a Microsoft KB article KB2768648, suggesting a few fixes.
Workaround for Office 2013
In KB2768648 and within this Technet blog article Microsoft provides a hint: If there are rendering issues in Microsoft Office 2013, the user shall try to disable hardware acceleration. On an individual machine, the user can open up advanced properties (Word, Outlook, Excel) and select the option to "Disable hardware graphics acceleration".
Addendum: It seems that the hardware graphics acceleration is responsible for several Excel rendering glitches. The strangest thing I saw, are lagging Excel windows while dragging, that occurs in August 2019 (see my blog post Windows 10: Excel window lags during dragging).
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The workaround to disable the hardware graphics acceleration also worked in that case as a solution for Excel 2016 window lags during dragging in Windows 10 (see the comment here). I guess, it helps also for other rendering issues caused by some Office updates in several Microsoft Office version (see the links below). Microsoft have had addressed this issue in 2017 for Office 2013 (see this blog post).
Similar articles
Microsoft Office Patchday (October 3, 2017)
Windows 10: Excel window lags during dragging
Microsoft Office 2013: Rendering issue after Update
Windows 10 V1903 Inplace Upgrade: Issues with Office 2013
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