Living a SharePoint life

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Opening Word file from SharePoint 2010 causes Office to crash

Today I wasn’t able to open a Word file from the SharePoint Server. Every time I opened the document from the server, Word crashed. Saving the file to disk and opening it then worked just fine. What made it even worse was that SharePoint thought the file was opened exclusive for my user account and I couldn’t do any action on the file on the server e.g. deleting. Bugs! I don’t like them, but it’s always a good feeling when you found out how to get rid of ‘em.

Because I was working on the structure of the document library, I knew already that adding a managed metadata column to the library was causing the trouble. After removing the column everything work just as expected and the Word file could be opened. Adding the managed metadata column back in and all the trouble started all over.

First I suspected SharePoint for causing the problems but in fact it was the Office installation. To be precise, both installations. The computer I was working on had an Office 2010 Professional with SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 installed. The newer shared components from the Designer 2013 installation seemed to cause the problems. To fix the issue you simply must remove the SharePoint 2013 Designer and run the repair function from the Office 2010 setup. After a reboot, Viola every worked the way it suppose to.

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