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I need to open documents, make some temporary changes and print them, and I prefer to open the file as read-only so that I don't accidentally save those changes.
Since a recent Office update when I open the document as read-only I can no longer make any changes to it.
This is not because of the file, when testing with older files word has the same behaviour.
Word now displays a dropdown on the top bar near the share and feedback buttons (see image, sorry it's in Portuguese) that says it's in view only mode, but all the other properties are grayed out.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Answer accepted by question author
Hi Juan,
As others mentioned, saving as a word template (dotx) is the only solution available at the moment.
It's not ideal for my situation, but see if it works for you.
I am simply amazed that MS found it necessary to enact this change without a way to revert to the previous behavior. We have HUNDREDS of documents that we set with a password to modify, or choose Read-Only. MS needs to back off on this one or at least grant admins the authority to revert to previous behavior. And yes, this happened with the mid-December 2022 update. Thanks, MS, for breaking something so important right before the holidays!
This is a pathetic update typical of MS behaviour - "lets change something so fundamental that it affects millions of users worldwide without any notification - oh and at the same time, lets not let them have any workaround whatsoever"
We still have the same issue and we are having to do the Save As from a network share to the local PC just to do a quick text edit and print. We have hundreds of these docs that users edit for various reasons and we are not prepared to spend hours changing them to doct
Hi Sergio,
We've been encountering the same issue since mid December where if our word forms open read-only for any reason then we are unable to fill the form fields and then print them.
That was not an issue before.
Have you found any solution?
Thanks
Thank you for your reply, but this is not an issue with protected view. These are files that are in a network share, not downloaded from the internet, and I already have protected view completely disabled.