Publisher giving Error 400 code?

I had to contact MS ech support twice on this one.

The first time the technician had me uninstall & reinstall MS Office 365 - - - which did not resolve the problem.

The second time 2/26/24 a different technician did an Office &/or Publisher update and the problem with Publisher [error code 400] was resolved.

So, my recommendation is to get through to MS tech support to a technician & make the second recommendation to them. Or you can try it on your own first.

-George

Try this:

1, Hit windows key and R at the same time for the "run" box to pop up.

2. copy and paste the following to the run box %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef

(or browse to c:\users\YOURUSERNAME\appdata\local\microsoft\office\16.0\WEF)

3. Delete the webview2 folder

This will clear the cache for the embedded webbrowser that office talks to the web with.

It worked for a similar issue for me today. I used process monitor to figure out that office was calling the microsoft webview2 control and the location of the user-data folder.

When you try to insert a picture via the Home tab, Publisher attempts to open a dialog where you can choose both online and local options. I believe it is choking on trying to find the online options via a Bing search and/or from a cache of pictures you have saved to One-Drive.

If you want to insert a picture located on your computer or even a USB drive or other external hard drive, the better work flow is to go to the Insert tab > the Illustrations group and select Pictures there. Then you won't choke Publisher trying to make the internet connection. And the Online options are also available...

In my view you should never try to insert a picture directly from an online source to begin with. Best practices in my opinion is to always save that picture to your local hard drive and insert from there. That way you have a copy of the picture if you need to use it again, edit it before you insert it. Further you are far less likely to corrupt the picture or the Publisher publication by trying to insert directly from the internet source.

If you insist on inserting pictures directly from OneDrive then this article may be helpful in resolving the problem you are having.

Insert Online Picture or Video: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/unable-to-access-onedrive-from-insert-online-picture-or-video-265e1fed-7e61-4a22-b8ff-52c1dccc101d?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

DavidF

When I try to hit the pictures icon on publisher in the "Home" header to add a picture to something the window comes up saying:
"Bad Request- Request too Long. Http Error 400. the size of the request headers is too long."
If I go to insert at the top of the page and click picture there it will work for uploading pictures from my computer.
I made sure office is updated but not sure how to fix this.
Help please?

I finally found a real solution:

1. Close all Office applications including Publisher \ Edge \ Teams \ Outlook etc.

Go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\ folder.

2. Remove Wef\webview2 Folder.
3. Remove mspub.exe_Rules.xml file
4. Remove mspub.exe_Rules folder

The same here!