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TccDeveloper-7569 asked emilyhua-msft edited

Latest version of Word 365 is choking on some WordML documents from past Word versions

Our app that couples with MS Word has been using the WordML / WordprocessingML file format (rather than .docx, .doc, or .rtf) successfully for almost two decades, since it is easier for a .NET app to process (given the nice XML support built into .NET).

Unfortunately, the latest version of Word 365 sometimes chokes on our WordML formatted documents (saved by prior versions of Word), such that we’re having to tell our users to roll back to older versions of Word. Note: our app never writes these WordML docs ourselves; we just tell Word to save in that format. Our app only reads the WordML. So, this is just the newer Word 365 being incompatible with the older versions of Word.

The error is always like these:

We’re sorry. We can’t open the document The Older Document because we found a problem with its contents.
Details: Whitespace expected. Location: Line: 1, Column: 94104

We’re sorry. We can’t open the document The Original Document because we found a problem with its contents.
Details: Equal expected. Location: Line: 1, Column: 79747

We’re sorry. We can’t open the document The Simplified Document because we found a problem with its contents.
Details: ‘>’ expected. Location: Line: 3, Column: 93890


Attached is an example WordML doc that fails to open in Word 365 version 2106 (Build 14131.20278 Click-to-Run) with that last message.

It opens fine in Word 365 version 2104 (Build 13929.20408 Click-to-Run), or earlier versions.

Assuming the fix won’t be imminent, it would be very helpful to know if there’s a particular pattern that it chokes on that we might be able to programmatically fix outside Word, given the error message tells us where it chokes and the character it was expecting.

Thanks!
---- Brian

P.S. I could not upload the 140KB WordML doc as either .xml file or .txt file because each time it would tell me "This attachment is not permitted because the file type is invalid.", even though it says it supports .xml and .txt file types. But if you'd like a copy to test, I'd be happy to send it to you.

P.P.S. If there's a better place for me to report such a bug to Microsoft, a pointer would be great. (The places I used to report such seem to have vanished.)

office-addins-dev
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@TccDeveloper-7569
To better help you, I would suggest you raise this issue in Word app, go to File > Feedback > Send a frown, then submit a feedback on it.
Besides, I would modify the tag to be "office-addins-dev" which is the tag of "Open XML Format SDK".
Thanks for your understanding.

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