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
    2015-10-08T00:01:58+00:00

    Thanks Marc - we're working on this. I'll circle back as soon as I can.

    ...pc

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-08T00:54:16+00:00

    Thanks JN - additional detail is always appreciated....pc

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-08T01:27:25+00:00

    I'm experiencing this too, it's something 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. I have seen it work opening the new document the first time occasionally (but not the second time) it prompts for a username and password which failed because I have 2FA turned on and received an email from Microsoft saying I need to use an app password.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-08T07:44:09+00:00

    Same problem here. Exact same symptoms. Also on Win10 with Office 2016.

    As a workaround:

    1. Open the template on which your document is based (make sure you open it and don't create a new document).
    2. Open the document, you want to edit.

    For me this works. Hopefully it will help you, too.

    Obviously this is rather cumbersome, but at least I am not blocked anymore.

    I do hope that MS will come with a fix for this VERY soon. I have hundreds of documents affected by this.

    One more thing:

    When inspecting the template, I find 'Custom XML Data'. No idea, what it is and where it came from. I also tried removing it, but it came back.

    Maybe this is also a point to check.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-10-08T08:54:23+00:00

    Looks like Excel 2016 has the same problem

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