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Why won't word open in protected view instead of giving me the following error? "Word experienced an error trying to open the file"

Anonymous
2013-03-05T01:37:33+00:00

There seems to be a lot of talk on the internet about office's "protected view" feature and the error "Word experienced an error trying to open the file".  All posts either answer by saving the file, right-clicking, properties and choosing unblock, or disabling protected view.

Nothing seems to address that protected view is simply not functioning correctly.  As I understand it, if I open a file that is blocked or open an attachment straight from outlook, then the file should open in a sandboxed, read-only, protected view.  THIS IS WHAT I WANT FOR MY USERS.

As designed it should open in protected view and give me an information bar asking if I want to allow editing, or another bar that states editing is not allowed, or one that states that the file contains unsafe content.

Instead it does not open at all and gives "Word experienced an error trying to open the file".

A few of my clients are in a SBS 2011 Domain environments running XP/Win7 on the desktops and they cannot open ANY office document from untrusted sources (outlook attachment) without unblocking the file and/or disabling protected view.

We like the security features that protected view provides and would like it to simply work correctly.

Could someone please tell us how to make this happen?

Thanks,

John Hamilton

Hamilton & Company, LLC

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-12-28T19:36:25+00:00

    Looks like the arrows in my path specification didn't render correctly. Providing the right path and a screenshot.

    Options > Advanced > Display > “Disable hardware graphics acceleration”

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-12-28T18:47:16+00:00

    This is a HUGE time-wasting issue!!!  Is there any development on the fix for this?  How can this be allowed to unresolved for so long???

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  3. Stefan Blom 340.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-12-22T20:31:22+00:00

    As stated previously, there is a known problem with Protected view in Office running on Windows 10. None of the regular posters in this forum can make any promises on Microsoft's behalf, but Microsoft is certainly working on a fix.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-12-22T20:07:51+00:00

    Thanks, but I still wonder when MS will address this bug. It seems to affect a great deal of people on Win 10 that use their new concept of office.

    I really don't want to disable Protected View, but if MS does not fix soon, I'll be forced to disable.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-12-22T19:52:41+00:00

    I believe that I posted a viable solution, which was followed by some others.  Since I implemented them I have been able to work without any issues.  In essence, do the following:

    Check the date when you first detected this problem, as perhaps there was an automatic update of all your MS Office softwares (Word, Excel, etc).  Then go to your update system and reverse these updates back to what it was before that time.

    Once this is done, then go to each of the MS system (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc) and go to File==> Options ==> Trust Center  and click in Trust Center Settings.  Then go to Protected View, and unclick all the options available there.

    Click OK and make sure that all MS Office are like that.  Yes you will have to do it on all, including Project, and some of the other MS Office that are not common if you have them as part of your Office suite.

    Is a pain in the #@*$$ but this is the only way that I made it work.  Also, make sure that you disable automatic updates on you Windows system.  This will it will not revert back to what it was before.

    Hope this help.

    Greg.

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