Users can’t edit document in SharePoint 2013 with Word 2013

There are so many reasons that can prevent users from editing a document. If you are experiencing the same symptoms and have the same environment as described below then you are probably having the same problem and my solution should work for you too.

Case and Environment

• SharePoint 2013 (build 15.0.4667.1000)
• Word 2013, 32 bit (build 15.0.4615.1000)
• Users can open and edit documents with Word 2010 without any problem
• Users can open documents as read only but they can’t edit documents in Word 2013. Word 2013 hangs and the process must be killed.
• IMPORTANT!: The document library or the content type has a choice field with only number choices (relatively big numbers)

Troubleshooting

After some time lost in troubleshooting (checking form another PC, inspecting the document content, checking permissions, inspecting the traffic with Fiddler,…) I didn’t find anything. Then I started removing columns from the content type one by one and testing the result. As soon as I removed one of the choice columns the problem was gone. Obviously Word 2013 is having troubles with SharePoint choice fields. That choice field had 15 choices and all were big numbers (2000,2001,…,2014). I added the choice field back and started to experiment with different range of consecutive numbers and got the following results:

Choice Values	Edit in Word 2013
49,50,…,60	OK
49,50,…,62	OK
49,50,…,64	Failed
157,158,…,164	OK
154,155,…,164	Failed
1162,1163,1164	OK
1560,1561,1562,1563,1164	Failed

From the results we see that Word 2013 has more problems with bigger numbers, it can handle 14 choices with smaller numbers (sequence 49,50,..,62) but it can only handle 3 values with bigger numbers (sequence 1162,1163,1164).
The results presented above probably depend on the available resources for Word 2013, so on another more powerful PC it would probably be able to handle more choice values.
I can’t be sure what Word 2013 is trying to do when it has only number choices but we can add a text choice so Word 2013 treats them all as text. As soon as a text choice is added to the field Word 2013 works fine.
In my case I fixed it by adding a text choice “NA” so now the choice field has the following choices “NA”,”2000″,”2001″,…,”2014″.

Solution

Since Word 2010 is working fine with the same SharePoint choice field its clear that this is a Word 2013 issue, a bug we hope will be fixed with future updates.
As a workaround the problem can be fixed by adding at least one text choice value for the choice field which has only number choices.