Word 2016 opens as blank page since upgrade to Sierra

I am having this same issue also. After upgrade to Sierra, my office 2016 for Mac opens existing documents blank. I can see the text in the preview and if I move around on the blank page, some of the text flashes. This is so freaking annoying!!! Power point and Excel work fine. I have several Word docs I am working on and I can't see them at all. HELP! I've tried all kinds of workarounds, etc. with fonts from the Microsoft website but to no avail. I am going to pull my hair out if I can't get this resolved!

Hi,

I am having a similar problem - the main difference being that in my case after a reboot Word (it is version 15.33 and I am running Sierra 10.12.4) will work normally for a while before eventually 'breaking' and displaying a white window, with no text, in place of the normal edit window. The usual red, orange and green close, minimise and full-screen buttons also disappear, as does the name of the document and the other icons on the title bar of the window; the Office tab names (Home, Insert etc) are visible. Word itself seems to be responding to inputs (I seem to be able to type, for example) so it does seem to be frozen but rather the display of text (etc) seems to have failed - Word reacts as if there is text, but it is invisible. I have tried changing the font colour, but this has no effect. Immediately before this white edit-window problem develops - as I wrote above Word works fine for a while after a reboot - I notice that it becomes impossible to select text in Word. Word is the only application that has this problem. Once the problem develops, shutting down and restarting Word does not fix the problem.

all the best,

Jeremy

HI,

In my case this problem happened with a new, out of the box, just arrived from China (though Designed in California, and Tax Paid in Ireland), Mac Book Pro - just a couple of months old. Subsequent updates to OS X and Word have not solved the problem. In such a situation I wonder how much an reinstall could be expected to fix things. I doubt it counts as an enriching user experience. My old MacBook Pro (late 2012, running 10.11) has no problems with Word, and that is basically a 10 year old pile of OSX versions.

The 'white-screen' problem does not happen immediately I start Word, and the problem only affects Word 2016 - Word 2008 is fine. My feeling is that Word files containing certain components cause the breakdown, and this kind of thing can happen with any app. What is disappointing is that the breakdown of an app can compromise the system so that a reboot is required to fix the problem. I am really hoping to discover that there is a little helper-app started by Word which breaks and which is not killed when Word is shutdown, and if I were to shut that down, I could neatly fix the problem. Needing to reboot (or worse) an operating system to fix a problem caused by an app is so very 1990s and I really hope Apple is not given up on building robust operating systems.

Jeremy

The Apple logo should never blank out. I would suspect that the OS upgrade didn't install correctly. Make a full, restorable backup, then install Sierra again.

cmyk5199 wrote:

I am having this same issue also.

Same issue? same answer

Reinstall, backup first.