Word 2016 hangs when opening a document based on a template

Anonymous
2015-10-04T11:47:18+00:00

I store my documents in:

OneDrive\Shared Documents\Business

and my templates in

OneDrive\Shared Documents\Templates

As I've done for over a year.

All worked fine in Office / Word 2013

Word 2016 will hang if I try and open a document that is based on a template.

The templates are available.

I've tried renaming the templates and removing spaces in the names but that didn't help.

If I remove the template the document will open and show as based on Normal.dotx.

All templates and documents use the new 2016 file format and are saved as .dotx.

Please note:

I'd rather you didn't reply to this issue if you haven't actually experienced this problem or if you haven't actually tried the fix you propose.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-07-12T12:56:14+00:00

    So, if I store the Templates on OneDrive, but in a folder, that has not been shared, it shouldn't be an issue?

    I don't remember sharing this folder (with the template in), but I will check.

    And still, this doesn't help with all the Word documents, that have been created pointing to the previous problem-location, I guess...

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-07-12T12:47:42+00:00

    Just wanted to point out that a workaround is to store the templates in a non-shared OneDrive folder. This enables the documents to open without problems

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-07-12T12:30:26+00:00

    Yes, it works. The hard part is getting to open the document so as to change it :)

    So what you have to do is:

    1. Open the Template, that the document uses, and keep it open.
    2. Open the Word document, that uses the template
    3. Open Templates and Add-ins windows and change the template to normal.dotm
    4. Save

    Then it works.

    But as said previously: It's a (rather bad) workaround, not a fix. We need a hotfix :)

    Thank you for taking this to the Office Team!

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-07-12T12:24:15+00:00

    There was an update released a few months back, but it seems that it didn't work for everybody. I'll ask the Office team for a follow-up.

    In the meantime, have you tried manually changing the attached template to Normal.dotm?

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-07-12T12:12:48+00:00

    But still: This is a issue introduced with Office 2016.

    This was not an issue with Office 2013, and it occured immidiately after installation of Office 2016.

    Hence, this is a bug, and Microsoft needs to address this with a hotfix.

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