Forum Discussion
"Word experienced an error trying to open the file" when OneDrive is running
Has anyone else had this error in connection with OneDrive? In our case, a user has unable to open a particular Word document in a synced SharePoint library. I'm sure it isn't a problem with the file itself, or with permissions on it since:
- none of the other users had any issue accessing the file
- pausing OneDrive sync allowed the document to open in Word - unpausing it caused the problem to return
- after copying and pasting the document into the same folder, it was possible to open the copy without problems
My guess is that the internal Office sync was maintaining some sort of lock that was conflicting with OneDrive's sync. Any ideas?
LiamCromar Did you ever solve this? I just ran into the problem after wiping my system, updating from Win10 to Win11, and trying to get into any of my onedrive files from my backup. And yes, the only way so far I've found was from your post here about pausing in order to get the files to open. I really shouldn't have to go in and pause my onedrive in order to open these files. Never had to before I reset and update to Win11.
To be honest I can't recall whether we fixed the issue or if it just went away. I remember we had an issue with long path names (over ~260 characters) - turned out OneDrive (or it might have been Word) wasn't entirely happy with them and shortening them improved matters.
