Microsoft Office 2016 crashes when saving files

I was working on some Word and Excel documents the other day and every time I tried to save them the applications would crash. I ended up having to force close the applications and when I reopened them it would auto-recover my documents but if I tried saving them again it would crash again. When I looked for the files in my documents folder they did seem to be present, although they weren't uploading to my OneDrive folder.

My setup is Windows 10 and Microsoft Office 2016.

After some intensive searching on the internet I found the problem was due to a Windows 10 issue that was fixed in a Windows update. Therefore, why was my Windows not up to date?

The source of my answer was found on this Microsoft forum post. As it took me a long time to find the answer and all the other forums suggested a wide range of other unsuccessful solutions I have written up the definitive answer in this blog post.

The Solution

I went to the Windows Start menu and selected Settings:

Select Update & security:

It showed it was in the process of downloading an update and once complete I ran it by clicking Restart now. Once complete I was able to open the documents I had created and when I saved them I was able to close the applications without any problem.