Favorites and Recents Don't Show Up when Starting Excel

When Simon opens Excel, the program asks what he wants to open. It displays three tabs (Recent, Favorites, and Shared with Me). The problem is that Simon doesn't always get the full list of favorites on the Favorites tab; he usually just gets a couple. When that occurs, then he also doesn't get all the recently opened workbooks listed on the Recent tab. Simon cannot see a pattern in how or when this occurs, and it is very annoying to him.

I'm going to assume that Simon is using Microsoft 365 because that is the version in which this behavior makes the most sense. Excel and all Office apps are tied to the cloud in Microsoft 365, meaning that information regarding your installation is stored in Microsoft's servers. If your installation of Microsoft 365 cannot access those servers, even intermittently, then you can have strange things occur.

What might cause the lack of access? Obviously, an unstable internet connection could do it, as could a flakey connection through servers between your system and Microsoft. This could be the result of latency issues somewhere in the connection chain, or perhaps latency issues introduced on your computer because of background tasks bogging down the system.

If you store files in OneDrive or on some other virtual drive, such as Dropbox, then the problem can be exacerbated. Excel may know which recents or favorites it should display, but if it cannot reach those files in the virtual drive, then it won't display them because it believes they are no longer available.

If you don't think the issue is related to your internet connection or background tasks on your system, you might try completely signing out of Microsoft 365, restarting your system, and signing back in. That may refresh the data necessary for your Microsoft 365 account and help make things run smoother.

If that still doesn't help, consider clearing the file cache used by Excel. Navigate to the following folder:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OfficeFileCache

In this path, the "username" should be replaced with the name of your user account. Anything in the folder can be deleted. You should also realize that the cache is used by other programs in the Office suite, as well. Anything you delete from the folder will be automatically rebuilt the next time you start Excel (or other Office app).

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11489) applies to Microsoft Excel Excel in Microsoft 365.