Hey there.
I am a regular user of VMWare workstation in situations where I have to login to multiple customer environments. It really helps to keep from polluting my primary machines with credential information, VPN software, and the like. On this one Windows 8 image my office products would regularly be very difficult to use because of the rendering of the graphics, primarily the ribbon (see below image). In some cases is was not usable at all.
After much research, and just before I was to give up on this particular VM I looked through the advanced settings of Excel and found this one settings Disable hardware graphics acceleration. Once I set this option to on and closed the dialog box the screen of Excel immediately cleared up! What a relief!
Thanks for reading!
-Daniel Bell