Documents won't open in word

[PatConner42]

When I try to open a document in Word it is instead pinned to the task bar but will not open for editing.  It is possible to send it as an email attachment which can be opened by the recipient. I believe it is 2016 version of Word - Windows 10 operating system

thanks 

[#2]

Has the Office installation been activated? What do you see if you go to File>Account?

[#3]

Thanks for the response. I assume the office installation was activated. Word has worked normally for several years and excel still is working normally. The problem arose this week. I dont know where to find File>account

[#4]

Click on the File tab on the Ribbon and you should see Account at the bottom of the list. If it is no there, there may be a More item and if you click on that, you should see it.
Another thing that you might try is to perform an On-Line repair of the Office installation as detailed in the Knowledge Base article at:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Repair-an-Office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c...

[#5]

@PatConner42 

Restart your computer and then run an online repair as Doug suggested. 

[#6]

When I try to open Word it is pinned to the taskbar and does not provide access to the ribbon. Same result when I try to open an existing word document from "this PC". I tried the procedures from the Knowledge Base article without success. I next reinstalled Office, again, without success. Excel continues to work without a problem, so I suspect the issue has something to do with the interaction between Word and "pinning" which is far beyond my comprehension.

[#7]

@PatConner42 If you move the mouse cursor over the Word icon on the Task Bar, what do you see?

Does the problem still occur if you start Word in Safe Mode by holding down the CTRL key while starting it until asked to confirm that you want to start it in that mode?

If not, see the section dealing with Add-Ins in the KnowledgeBase article "How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word" at:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/921541

[#8]

Thanks, Starting in safe mode works. I will stick with that

[#9]

@PatConner42 Safe mode is really only intended to allow diagnosis of a problem and you should look at the section dealing with Add-Ins in the article for which I included a link.

If you click  on the the Word Add-ins or Document Template buttons on the Developer tab of the ribbon

and there are no Add-Ins listed in the list with the text "Checked items are currently loaded", the problem is probably with the Normal.dotm template and you should go to the Templates folder and rename it to OldNormal.dotm (with Word not running), and then try starting Word in the normal manner.