Microsoft Word May Crash When Third-Party Apps Populate Document Templates, the Company Investigates

Microsoft has confirmed a new issue affecting Word after updating to Version 2608 (Build 20326.x). According to the company, Word might close unexpectedly when certain third-party document or case management applications attempt to generate and populate documents from templates.

Microsoft is investigating the Word crashing issue

The company updated the issue documentation yesterday, marking the status as “Investigating.” As of now, the company hasn’t provided a workaround or confirmed when a fix will become available. The issue especially appears when third-party applications interact with Word to generate and populate document templates.

Microsoft has not provided a complete list of affected third-party applications, so it remains unclear how widespread the problem is. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time third-party software has caused problems with Microsoft Office apps this year. Back in June, Microsoft confirmed that Windows updates KB5094126, KB5093998, and KB5094127 could cause Office apps to fail to launch from some third-party applications. That issue affected software using OLE automation to communicate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

Not the only Office app that has been affected lately

Word isn’t the only Office app dealing with problems recently either. Microsoft recently confirmed that Excel’s copy-and-paste feature may stop working after the KB5002914 security update⁠ The bug affects Excel 2024, Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and Excel 2016, with paste operations sometimes failing without displaying an error.

With both Word and Excel experiencing separate issues following recent updates, affected users will have to wait for Microsoft to provide further details. It remains to be seen how quickly the Word team can identify what is causing the latest crashes and roll out a fix.