Viewing your Uber receipts will crash Microsoft Outlook

If you’re a Uber user, you’d probably wait until next week to open your emailed receipts from the ride-sharing service. Why? Because they’ll cause Outlook to crash. Microsoft Word, too.

Bleeping Computer highlights a support document from Microsoft that describes the problem. Uber uses what Microsoft refers to as “complex tables” as part of its receipt email, and those complex tables currently cause Outlook and Word to crash. It not only affects the Current Channel of Outlook (i.e., the version you most likely use) but preview builds in the Current Channel and even the Beta Channel, too.

Word (and Outlook) will roll out a fix, but that fix will only go live when Microsoft deploys its Patch Tuesday updates next week, on August 9. Until then, your best bet is simply just to avoid Uber’s emails altogether.

If you simply can’t do that, Microsoft recommends the following steps. First, open a Command Prompt with Administrator privileges. Second, enter the following two commands, hitting the Enter key after each:

cd %programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun

officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.15225.20288

Of course, you’re perfectly free to open a receipt from Uber or any other email provider on another client. (Presumably you could also forward the email to another account, such as Gmail’s web client, to open it there.) Microsoft also hasn’t identified any problems of this type that are associated with the Outlook app for Android and iOS, either. If all of that doesn’t work for you, though, you’ll simply have to wait until next week, or avoid using Uber altogether?