MS word opens regular documents as templates--make it stop

[TSBG]

I’ve been having trouble with some but not all MS Word documents recently–they have the extension .docx, but open as templates. Sometimes doing a save and replace with the same filename clears up the problem, but not every time. What’s going on and how do I make it stop?

[Ethilrist]

I don’t know if this is the same issue, but a problem discussed here:

Can I separate a word Doc (docx) from the template used to create it (dotx)?

said

… the dotx is on a network location with incredibly slow performance. When I open the docx, I get a progress dialog box stating “opening <template.dotx>”…

Is that what’s happening? If so, the suggested workaround was:

1. Copy the template from your network to your local machine, then re-attach the document to the local version. (I’m currently on a Mac, but the process would be the same: Save the template to the ‘My templates’ (or similar) folder. Then go through Tools, Templates and Add-ins, Attach (or whatever the corresponding commands are in your version of Word) and attach to the local version.
2. Attach the document to an existing template on your local machine, e.g. the Normal template. Make sure not to check the ‘Automatically update document styles’ box though.

[TSBG]

Sounds like not quite the same problem, but I will give this a try. Thank you.