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Hi everyone,
I’m experiencing a frustrating issue with Word for Mac (Insider version 16.92.24112016). When I try to open a file, the application immediately hangs and then locks up. I’m unable to do anything until I force quit the app. This problem started happening randomly today. If I open Word in safe mode or just hold control to take it to the main welcome screen, its fine until I open any document and then it immediately locks up and hangs.
Steps I’ve Tried:
Unfortunately, none of these steps resolved the issue.
I attached a photo showing what the toolbar looks like when it hangs, it just spins showing the text formatting.
Additional Details:
• macOS version: macOS Sequoia - 15.2 (Build 24C5089c)
• Type of file opened: Blank Doc and Any Word Doc
If anyone has encountered a similar problem or has suggestions for other troubleshooting steps, I’d greatly appreciate your help!
Thanks in advance for your support!
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Using special characters in any file name, folder or volume is an easy way to cause a lot of trouble.
Characters to avoid
https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/websites/writing/characters-avoid/
Though I do agree it has to do with some kind of content causing it, I think I narrowed it down to either a file with ( ) in the file name or a table I copied and pasted from excel with data in it. Reason I think it's the table is I was able to get it to load for a bit and I copied the table data out of the document. When I tried to move it to excel to keep it, excel then locked up immediately and hung. The table though is just CSV data, nothing more which is weird.
Whatever the culprit is, it totally messes up the application permanently and only way to resolve is to reinstall the specific product. I reported the issue to Microsoft for now.
Because Word is OK when booting to Mac OS Safe Mode, the problem is not with installation or version issues. Most likely you have a bad or duplicate font, or a third party application that is causing interference with Microsoft Word.