Excel 2013 and 2016 have a great inbuilt feature of having online pre-built templates available for different purposes. You find them by going to File > New. Templates such as Family Budgets or Back to School Planners. They’re hosted by Microsoft and download the template as you need them:

List of Excel 2016 Templates

Normally you’d pick the template you want, and use the create option:

Creating an Excel 2016 Template

However, there’s a scenario I found that this doesn’t work, and you’ll see the message ‘Something went wrong while downloading your template’:

Something went wrong

After digging around for a bit, I found this Technet thread which mentioned uninstalling Visio Viewer to fix it. Seems strange, but I tried this and it worked. I wasn’t happy with that as a solution though, so logged a Microsoft case.

I went through the process of capturing fiddler traffic and logs, but was then asked a simple question: Was Visio Viewer 32 or 64 bit? I had a look and it was 64 bit, however the Office 2016 suite itself was 32 bit. I quickly guessed that 32 and 64 bit wasn’t a good mix for Office products, even if they were installed separately.

Sure enough, using Visio Viewer 32 bit with Excel 2016 32 bit fixed the problem.

TL;DR – Visio Viewer needs to match your Office/Excel install – 32 bit or 64 bit for both.