Microsoft Office January Updates Fix Outlook Crash Issues

Microsoft has released the January 2021 non-security Microsoft Office updates with fixes for known issues impacting Windows Installer (MSI) editions of Office 2016 products.

Microsoft has also released non-security updates in Current Channel releases for Microsoft 365 Apps to address Excel crashes and Outlook hangs.

The KB4493166 update addresses an issue causing users to experience recurrent crashes while using Outlook 2016.

This update also fixes issues blocking justification texts when overriding a policy and causing the headers of Chinese messages to become unreadable when replying to or forwarding emails.

Although these are issued as non-security updates, this month Microsoft has also issued KB4484509 which comes with Access 2016 reliability improvements for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) projects, and KB4493157 to improve Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) projects’ signature scheme.

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January 2021 non-security updates

This month’s Office non-security updates can be manually installed from the Download Center or automatically by using the Microsoft Update service.

The updates only apply to perpetual versions of Office using Microsoft Installer (.msi)-based installers and do not apply to Microsoft 365 Apps.

The full list of updates and the Office products they apply to is embedded below.

Office Product	Knowledge Base article
Microsoft Access 2016	KB4484509
Microsoft Office 2016	KB4493157
Microsoft Outlook 2016	KB4493166
Microsoft Project 2016	KB4493159

Some updates may require a restart

After applying some of this month’s Microsoft Office updates you may also be requested to reboot your computer

If you experience issues after updating your Office installation, you can easily uninstall the update by going through the following procedure:

1. Go to Start, enter View Installed Updates in the Search Windows box, and then press Enter.
2. In the list of updates, locate and select the offending update, and then select Uninstall.

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Depending on the Office update you’re using, you may also have to apply other updates to fully address issues on your device (for instance, KB4484509 requires installing KB4493157).