Sorry, there was a problem and we can't open this document. If this happens again, try opening the document in Microsoft Word

Question

We are facing an issue while opening office documents in SharePoint 2013 using Office Web App Server 2013 (OWA 2013). The below errors happens randomly on sites. Somewhere it works and somewhere it don't in our sites. Below is the error that we are facing.

"Sorry, there was a problem and we can't open this document. If this happens again, try opening the document in Microsoft Word."

Furthermore, we have recently installed below update for OWA 2013. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3172457/ms17-014-description-of-the-security-update-for-office-web-apps-server

We have tried googling and multiple fixes but so far no luck.

Any help?

Answer 1

If its working in some cases, it means the OWA is working and there could be something wrong on SharePoint side.

The update you have mentioned contains an issue with SharePoint 2013 where it do not work with the sites or the files path that have spaces in their URLs. For example,

OWA will work: http://webapplication/sites/subsite/WithoutSpace

OWA will not work: http://webapplication/sites/subsite/With Space

Microsoft has recently released its patch on April 11, 2017 for SharePoint on this issue. Apply below patch (be patience if you don't see anything happening on the screen for couple of minutes) on all SharePoint servers only (not OWA ones).

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3178732/april-11-2017-update-for-sharepoint-foundation-2013-kb3178732

Hope that will fix the issue.

Source: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/bd7da9fb-eff7-418b-9263-c19b25c1b65c/office-web-apps-server-2013-march-2017-update?forum=sharepointadmin