MS Office 2013 draws glitchy windows on Intel Atom netbook

I'm a proud owner of a monstrous netbook called Asus Eee PC 1101ha which has the Z520 cpu and GMA500 graphics card. It's notorious for being pretty slow.

Normally, all applications look perfectly fine with the exception of those which don't run at all because of graphics card incompatibility. MS Office 2013, however runs? but looks like this:

_{(What appears to be Word and Excel with calculator and notepad for reference)}

As you can see it's not even remotely usable.

I've had a similar issue with MSVS 2010 once before. Some portions of the window (not the whole window) were glitchy like above, but it was solved by turning off "hardware drawing" in the options.
Is there perhaps a similar option in MS Office apps? If so, what key sequence do I press in a fresh installation to toggle it?

user1306322

Posted 2014-07-23T19:43:04.743

Reputation: 4 237

I am pretty sure Office 2013 has a setting to attempt to use your GPU to make itself look pretty. Turn this option off. Edit....<sigh> Did you even bother doing a search?

– Ramhound – 2014-07-23T19:54:02.633

Oh yeah? How then? – user1306322 – 2014-07-23T19:54:43.557

The same way I learned how by doing a google search on "office 2013 hardware acceleration disable" – Ramhound – 2014-07-23T19:55:41.687

Cool. But how do I do it without seeing what the hell is going on on screen? :D – user1306322 – 2014-07-23T19:58:33.670

Use the group policy method... – Ramhound – 2014-07-23T20:14:58.350

It's complicated and I need detailed instructions to do that. It says Add the following files to your domain controller: Office15.admx and Office15.adml files to your domain controller but where do I find and add them? – user1306322 – 2014-07-23T20:17:23.040

Only other option. Remove the display driver. The option in Office isn't even suppose to be enabled by default. – Ramhound – 2014-07-23T20:19:57.247

Follow the instructions after you download http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35554 using the local group policy editor...

– Ramhound – 2014-07-23T20:22:55.820

Answers

Too many hoops. Both methods... Just ran into this exact problem. Here's what you can do:

Add the following by running regedit and adding the key, or copy the following text to a file called GraphicsFix.reg and double click the file to load it into your registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
"DisableHardwareAcceleration"=dword:00000001

This is a user-by-user setting and needs to be set for each person on the PC. I don't know if there is a HKLM that could be set globally on the PC, and I didn't bother to check.

Dannlh

Posted 2014-07-23T19:43:04.743

Reputation: 181

Ok I figured it out by using a working fresh copy of Office 2013 on another computer.

Start the MS Word application. It should look like this:

…But it doesn't because we have a glitchy graphics card, it looks like this instead:

Yes, we can still see hover tooltips by hovering cursor somewhere in the middle of the window, and this is how you must find the "Blank Document" template on the main page. Alternatively, just open any existing Word document.

Then when the window changes to document editing view, press Alt. Main menu should reveal its hotkeys:

Alright! Press F to open the File menu strip and you will see its hotkeys:

Press T and the Options window that isn't affected by this glitch will show up! Now you can go to "Advanced" tab and toggle "Disable hardware graphics acceleration" and just in case "Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen":

Then press OK and it's done!

This will also fix that glitch for Excel and other MS Office 2013 apps.

user1306322

Posted 2014-07-23T19:43:04.743

Reputation: 4 237