[German]With the Office 2016 update KB5002700 from April 8, 2025, users are facing problems with Office 2016 applications. The update caused crashes in Excel, Outlook and Word. On April 10, 2025, Microsoft released the KB5002623 update for Office 2016, which fixes these problems.
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Review of the Office 2016 update KB500270
Update KB5002700 fwas released on April 8, 2025. This update closes a number of security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-29791, CVE-2025-29792, CVE-2025-29816, CVE-2025-27745, CVE-2025-27748, CVE-2025-27749 and CVE-2025-27752). The installation of the security update is urgently required.
However, installing the update caused the Office 2016 applications Excel, Outlook and Word to crash. I reported on the problems with Outlook in the blog post Outlook 2016: Calendar access blocked after April 2025 update KB5002700 and mentioned disabling weather integration as a workaround.
In the blog post Word/Excel 2016 crashing after April 2025 update KB5002700 crashes in Word 2016 and Excel 2016 were mentioned. There was a suspicion that a PDF plugin could be the cause. However, I have different feedback, for some readers it helped to change an Adobe PDF plugin in the settings, for others not.
Update KB5002623 fixes the issues
German blog reader Michael wrote in this comment on April 10, 2025 that Microsoft had probably released a fix that he had not yet tested and that does not appear in the WSUS.
Microsoft has published a support article on the Office 2016 update KB5002623 with more detailed information. The update only applies to the MSI installer versions of Microsoft Office 2016 and is intended to fix a known issue with the KB5002700 update for Microsoft Office 2016 from April 8, 2025. The known issue is that Microsoft Word 2016, Microsoft Excel 2016 and Microsoft Outlook 2016 no longer respond.
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You have to download and install the update via the links in the support article from the MS download area. In the meantime, several blog readers have confirmed in comments that the crashes in Microsoft Word 2016, Microsoft Excel 2016 and Microsoft Outlook 2016 no longer occur.
Similar articles:
Microsoft Security Update Summary (April 8, 2025)
Patchday: Windows 10/11 Updates (April 8, 2025)
Patchday: Windows Server-Updates (April 8, 2025)
Patchday: Microsoft Office Updates (April 8, 2025)
Word/Excel 2016 crashing after April 2025 update KB5002700
Outlook 2016: Calendar access blocked after April 2025 update KB5002700
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Hello Gunter:
A little note: This KB5002623 is not available in Portuguese-Brazil or another language yet, except english.
Thanks.
I have left the same comment on the "Word/Excel 2016 crashing after April 2025 update KB5002700" thread — sorry about the duplicate here, but I though it was very relevant to this conversation as well:
The KB5002623 update has NOT resolved either the Word or the Excel crashing issue for me (Word was still crapping out on launch, and Excel, on selecting the Insert tab). Trying to uninstall the KB5002623 and KB 5002700 updates was not successful — they do appear in the "Installed updates" list in Settings, but not in the list under the Uninstall option. Also, the wusa command and DISM cannot find the corresponding packages and thus result in an error.
The workaround that was successful for me with Word was to remove the Acrobat PDFMaker COM addin (to do this, you have to launch an elevated command prompt, go to the C:/Program Files (X86)/Microsoft Office/Office16 folder, run the "winword /safe" command, go to the Developer tab, select "COM addins" from the ribbon, select the Acrobat PDFMaker addin in the list and click Remove). The same fix did NOT work for Excel, however; even after removing the PDFMaker addin, Excel still crashes when selecting Insert.
I have not tried the other suggested workaround for Word — setting the loadbehavior key in the registry to 0,– so I can't comment on that one.
Anyway, congratulations, Microsoft — this time, you really broke your users good and hard! Here's to hoping MS' next attempt at fixing this issue will actually work…
KB5002623 didn't help me either. But I found a workaround. I figured it out if I turn off the internet and start Excel everything works – even after turning on the internet.
The update (KB5002623) that fixes the earlier updates that crashed Excel, Outlook and Word are now available on our WSUS server.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/april-10-2025-update-for-office-2016-kb5002623-d60c1f31-bb7c-4426-b8f4-69186d7fc1e5
Why are the files dated March 22nd – well before KB500270 was released and these issues arose? Did MS simply forget to release update KB5002623 alongside KB500270? Or did they release KB500270 just hoping there wouldn't be widespread issues?