Ongoing MS Office Issues in Catalina

Just want to document my particular flavor of problems with MS Office and the Catalina upgrade on the off chance someone else is experiencing the same thing and/or has a solution.

After upgrading to Catalina and experiencing not being able to open the MS Office suite, I updated the latter to 16.31.

MS Office now limps along, working unreliably. I do not believe I have once had all 4 Office apps working at the same time since Catalina. Outlook usually works. Word, PPoint, and Excel are hit or miss. Either I can't open them, or they open but eventually freeze up. Worse, I will Force Quit, but the image of the file that had the problem will remain on the screen, so I have to restart.

The trick to reset NVRAM seems to help, but I seem to have to do it every time I have a freeze-and-restart.

I welcome any suggestions.