Word 2016 hangs when opening a document based on a template

We've gotten so fed up with this issue and other OneDrive for Business issues that we've banned the use of OneDrive for Business with sync'd SharePoint document sets entirely.

And before someone asks, yes the templates are attached properly, yes we've tried a million work arounds and different combinations.

If a user opens a word document that uses a template that is sync'd it fails to open. The only work around is to open the template first, then the document, which is not a pleasant experience (especially when you might not know in advance that it has a referenced template and you have to crash word out to use this work around).

Disassociating the template allows the document to open fine.

Again, using the latest, up-to-date version of Word and had this since the very beginning.

Regards,

Steve

All Word documents make use of templates. If you haven't actively selected a template for your new document, it is based on the blank document template (= Normal.dotm).

What specific content does your template provide? Does it contain macros?

Note that since you are using SharePoint, you may want to ask in one of the TechNet forums (start at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/home).

All Word documents make use of templates. If you haven't actively selected a template for your new document, it is based on the blank document template (= Normal.dotm).

What specific content does your template provide? Does it contain macros?

Note that since you are using SharePoint, you may want to ask in one of the TechNet forums (start at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/home).

It's not a specific template content causing the issue here, but the fact that the template a document is based on is located on OneDrive instead of being locally available (note that it does not matter whether the template is synchronized to the local OneDrive folder, as Word will always try to open the template from the OneDrive servers). Or as user "mcm_ham" put it back in October: "[...] I can reproduce by creating a new template in OneDrive then a new Word document based on the template then close and attempt to open the new word document. It only happens for me if the template is stored inside OneDrive, it works if it's stored outside OneDrive, and it doesn't matter if the created Word document is stored inside OneDrive or not for either case [...]". Also, this issue is not limited to SharePoint at all.

(For completeness sake, I experience the same issue on Windows 10 1511 with Office 365, all updates installed.)

It is possible that templates and cloud storage don't work well together. The path to the template is assigned when you create the template. On a local drive, keeping a document in the same folder as the attached template will help, though.

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.