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
    2016-05-30T04:01:55+00:00

    We are encountering the same issue. Seems to be documents generated by one staff member from our templates.

    But resulting docs hang for all staff members and we see the "Opening template.dotx" message even though we're opening the .docx file.

    Very bizarre.

    Has anyone found a solution?

    Cheers

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-05-30T10:34:06+00:00

    Word always opens, or tries to open, the attached template when it opens a document. This is normal but may cause trouble if the template is missing, especially if it was located on a network server which is no longer available.

    Are you able to open the problem document at all? If so, you an change the attached template in the Templates and Add-Ins dialog box.

    To display the dialog box, click the Developer tab and then click Document Template. (If you can't see the Developer tab, click File | Options | Customize Ribbon and click to select "Developer.") Change the attached template to Normal.dotm.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-05-30T11:01:24+00:00

    I had this problem early on when 2016 was released.  Moved all templates to a non-shared onedrive folder and this solved the problem.  Obviously if a template requires updating then it will have to be deployed to all users manually

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-05-30T11:54:17+00:00

    Thanks Marc,

    We've had our templates on a SharePoint shared team site folder for a while without any problems.

    Issue has just surfaced. Tonight I moved all templates to a local (non OneDrive/SharePoint) folder and the problem remains for existing documents created in the past few days.

    Will keep trying new things.

    Can't tell you how fed up we are with OneDrive for Business. Biggest piece of $*%( software I've ever encountered from Microsoft and I used to work there. I even used Groove before it was acquired by MS. Absolute joke they can't get it right.

    Cheers

    Stephen

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-05-30T11:55:57+00:00

    Thanks Stefan.

    The template is where it's always been and it's not a network issue, because there's a local copy sitting on the PC.

    Definitely seems to be a OneDrive/SharePoint issue. Not sure why it's only just started though.

    Stay tuned.

    Cheers

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