Excel for iOS Borked
Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers’ great annoyance.
The problems appear to have begun following the release of Excel version 2.102.1 for iOS and iPadOS on October 13, 2025. The release added support for Apple’s Liquid Glass design, which debuted with the September 15, 2025 release of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 – also credited with dozens of bugs.
The Register downloaded Excel for iOS, version 2.102.2, released three days ago, and found the app non-functional. The “+ Create” icon did not respond to touch events, which prevented the creation of a new spreadsheet from the menu of provided templates.
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Reports of problems began surfacing about a week ago and have continued since then.
Poor testing and communication from Microsoft, and because of the App Store customers have no way to revert to the last stable version.
Update (2025-10-24): Erik Schwiebert:
This has been addressed. It was unfortunately the intersection of a latent client-side bug (been there for a long time) and a change in a server-side policy that exposed the latent bug; the issue was not connected to the monthly update and Liquid Glass changes. It took more time than desired to identify the server-side change as the root cause.
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Not being able to roll back app or OS versions is probably the bit about iOS I dislike the most.
@Bri, I agree. What's the solution? I mean beyond what you can today....
My best thought would be to do a backup before updating.... oh, but that backup doesn't include installed apps. Don't install the update until others find out how it breaks things?
How someone would want to use a complete POS like Excel on iOS is beyond me. Folks, stop using crapware like MS Office.
@The dude I still find Excel to be the best Mac spreadsheet, and last I checked the iOS version was fine. What would you recommend instead?
