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I’m continuing to work on an exasperating Word 365 problem that I exhaustively documented in Microsoft’s purported support forum (documenting all of the hardware and software involved) earlier. As per usual, no luck.

Since that time, I’ve added the shared network path to the trusted locations for Word. Sometimes it works, opening and closing a network document instantly with only “starting” displayed in the splash screen when it opens – just like a local document. Other times, it displays a succession of “contacting” messages – the server, the directory, the file – before the document finally opens in over 10 seconds. And it closes even slower. This can even happen even on successive openings of the same document.

Everything would be fine if I could just get Word to always treat the files on the mapped network drive as local instead of residing on the Internet, but Microsoft doesn’t believe that there’s a problem if local documents open and close properly. Does anybody know a workaround or a combination of settings that will enable me to return to the network functionality of Word 2007?

trevbet
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  • Is this Word file saved in your Office 365 SharePoint or cloud environment? How many people have access to the file that it needs to be in a shared location? I unfortunately have a decent amount of experience with crossing my fingers and glaring at our network-drives-that-aren't-actually-network-drives, so if you give a bit more detail on how things are setup I can probably give you an answer. – mael' Jun 20 '19 at 20:36
  • No … the files are on a directory of a local server mapped as a local drive. SharePoint and cloud don't figure in at all. For all the details, click on the link in my opening message. I'll be happy to provide whatever else you need to know. – trevbet Jun 20 '19 at 21:18
  • I think I may have stumbled on to a clue: In the course of testing the behavior of other Office programs, I noticed that Word had no problem properly opening documents on other shared network drives with far fewer documents that the one that I need it to work with. That directory has over 50,000 files, over half of them Word documents. I know this is a lot, but we never had any problems with Word 2007. Isn't there a way for 365 to open files the same way 2007 did? – trevbet Jun 24 '19 at 15:11
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    If anyone's still interested, it turns out that this problem is embedded in Word 365 code. This was conceded by a Microsoft technician who witnessed it occurring on a machine with nothing but MS software installed (Windows 10 and Office 365, updated to the minute). Remove 365 and replace it with Office 2016 and the problem goes away. This was what $500 bought me in the way of paid support. They want MORE for a fix or workaround! – trevbet Jul 24 '19 at 16:38

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