Microsoft Office 2019 Application (Word / Excel) Missing
Creation date: 11/26/2024 10:02 AM
Updated: 7/21/2025 12:34 PM
- Verified the issue by clicking Start and searching for Word
- I found that the only entry that came up was WordPad
- Verified that Word wasn't listed under All Apps
- Click Start - All Apps
- Scroll to the bottom of the list
- Keep in mind, the user had Outlook and Excel open which means Office is installed (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, Powerpoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, & Publisher are all packaged to install together; they are not separate installs so if you have one, you have all)
Now that I've verified what was going on, I decided to see if the Word executable existed.
- Open File Explorer and browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16
- This is where Office 2019 installs the Office applications
- Scrolled all the way down to find the Word executable (it's named WINWORD.EXE)
- For future reference, below are the .exe names of each application...
- Microsoft Word = WINWORD.EXE
- Microsoft Excel = EXCEL.EXE
- Microsoft Powerpoint = POWERPNT.EXE
- Microsoft OneNote = ONENOTE.EXE
- Microsoft Outlook = OUTLOOK.EXE
- Microsoft Access = MSACCESS.EXE
- Microsoft Publisher = MSPUB.EXE
- Double clicked WINWORD.EXE
- For whatever reason, it just sat at the below screen for an entirely long time.
- Ultimately got impatient so I opened Task Manager and kill the WINWORD.EXE task
- Re-tried opening WINWORD.EXE a second time; this time, it opened almost instantly.
- Opened it a 3rd time just to ensure it wasn't a fluke and it worked.
- Clicked Start and typed Word to find that it was now being found
- Clicked Start - All apps to find that Word was now showing in the list above.
Bottom line = This scenario appears to be a linking issue where search entries / Start Menu entries are disappearing. By opening the application from its installed location, it seems those search entries / Start Menu entries re-create themselves.
User confirmed good after performing the above.
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