Microsoft Word hangs with dropbox

[Hubert L.]

Help! I can't use Word because it hangs when I try and browse files in Dropbox folder. I am on Word 2011 for Mac. If I use my mac finder to find a word doc in my dropbox folder, I can open with word fine. But if I am in Word and try to browse the dropbox folder, I get an endless spinning beachball and word freezes/hangs.

Any solution for this?

[Gabriela F.2]

Got the same problem and it totally disturbs my work. Any ideas? Please...

[Bob F.14]

Also experiencing this issue. On Yosemite 10.10.1

[Alexander P.10]

My wife and I are having the same problem on both of our computers, which are running Yosemite 10.10.2

[Sherry S.4]

I have the same problem. My workaround is to open documents from the Finder window but that is a poor man's solution. Does anyone from Dropbox read and respond to the questions on these forums?

[Niall G.1]

I have the same issue. MacbookPro, Retina 13", latest OS and MS Office 2011 updates applied. It took a while to isolate Dropbox/MS Office as the cause but after uninstalling and reinstalling Office 2011 and Dropbox, I was able to reproduce at will.

I reported to Dropbox support; their follow-up questions did not inspire faith as they focused on document size, macro and Dropbox badges (which I believe are WIndows-only).

Workaround for me is to use the Office 2016 Preview edition while waiting for a fix from either Dropbox or Microsoft.

[Niall G.1]

I contacted Dropbox support.

Their advice was to remove symlinks from the Dropbox folder. Even though this was unintuitive, I did and now Office 2011 open/file dialogs work as before.

Instructions below:

The problem you described may be related to these symlinks in your Dropbox folder. I'd like you to run the following command to determine if there are any symlinks in your account:

MAC:

1) Open your Terminal app (Located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal). You can also search for "Terminal" using the magnifying glass at the top of your screen.

2) Copy and paste the following line into the Terminal:

find ~/Dropbox -type l -exec ls -lah {} \;

This should give you a list of symlinks in your Dropbox folder and where they point to. The list the command provides shows you the full file path to every symlink in your account.

We recommend that you remove these symlinks from your Dropbox account. You can do that by following the file paths that are provided when you run the command, and remove the files in your Dropbox folder by dragging them elsewhere on your computer (if you don't want them deleted). After you've removed all of the symlinks you can identify from the Terminal command, please quit Terminal, open it again, and run the command again to ensure that no symlinks remain in your Dropbox folder.

In general, we recommend users move the actual folders into the Dropbox folder and then symlink back to the original locations. Please just keep in mind that we don't generally support the use of symlinks due to the issues that can arise when they are added to Dropbox.

[Alex M.54]

I have this issue as well, and Apple & Microsoft were unable to help, but did connect me with this thread.

My problem is that when I copy and paste the suggested line into the terminal, nothing happens. Any pointers?

[Edward H.2]

I also have this issue, and the terminal command isn't working to show the simlinks - please could you check the terminal command or suggest another way of doing this? Thanks

[David S.290]

I followed the advice, I've removed the symlinks, they are gone, I've rebooted...no change. Suddenly neither Word nor Excel will open files that are n Dropbox, but I can access them through Finder (open with Word). Something has changed. ALL my important data is in Dropbox.

I'm using Yosemite 10.10.2 and the latest version of Dropbox.

HELP!!!