[German]I have received a report from an IT employee about a strange Word bug that appears to occur after the September 2025 security updates. Word can no longer edit certain documents. It would be interesting to know if there are any other observations of this kind.
I would like to share a strange observation made by a blog reader who encountered this problem with one of his customers. In an email with the subject line "September Office Update," he states that he has not yet been able to find anything about this problem on the internet. However, the problem only arose for the customer after the September 2025 security updates were rolled out (see Patchday: Microsoft Office Updates (September 9, 2025)).
The problem and the environment
A customer of the IT service provider has had a Word document stored on a network share for ages. "Overnight," the formatting of this document was "ruined" when it was loaded into Microsoft Word.
The reader writes: "Since the document belongs to the customer, I would prefer not to send it. However, you can think of it as a normal fillable document that you are familiar with." The reader gave me the document shown in the screenshot above as an example.
The exact error
Everything is still on one A4 page (landscape/horizontal). However, the entire table that is to be filled out can no longer be edited. No matter where the user clicks in the document, they can no longer make any changes to the table in Microsoft Word. And the table cells are no longer aligned with the text, the reader wrote. Everything is "completely wildly formatted," somehow "squashed," the reader describes it.
No matter how far you scroll, you cannot access the second page of the document, which probably only exists because of the "broken" formatting. So Word is behaving rather strangely when loading this document.
The reader's first thought was that the document was probably an old Word document version (.doc and not .docx) and that someone had clicked on "migrate." However, this turned out to be incorrect and can be ruled out as the cause of the error.
Unfortunately, the reader did not provide any further information about which version of Word it was. But the matter becomes even more striking, because the reader writes that this document can be opened as usual in LibreOffice Writer. They also found an Office version on a PC with the August 2025 patch, where the Word document could be opened and filled out. Based on these observations, the reader assumes that this problem must be related to a September 2025 update for Microsoft Office.
Currently, the reader is having problems with the Silver Partnership with Microsoft, so it has not yet been possible to open a ticket with Microsoft. The question is whether anyone else has made similar observations that Microsoft Word is having problems editing documents after the September 2025 security update.
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