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Since last week i have had about 8 clients (personal and business license, windows 10 and 11) and about 3 this week that randomly cant open word and excel files from either the internet or outlook. It gives 2 errors: one says it cant open in protected view and the other says word experienced an error trying to open the file try these suggestions etc....it has been happening since last week and these clients will have received documents from other people for years with no issue and now all of a sudden it doesnt work. I have tried updating office but nothing. I also saw that if you save the file to your computer then go to properties and the unlock it there then the file works but that is a troublesome process for some clients as well as creating folders and configuring it to be a trusted source. I also tried checking if display drivers are the issue as it seems that has been a reported that intel display driver updates and then you need to rollback the update but that didn’t resolve anything either. The only thing i have seen work successfully is turning off protected view in both word and excel. When protected view is turned off, outlook still gives a pop up warning to only open documents from trusted sources but the internet does not give such option. I dont want to keep turning off protected view as it is a secuirty risk Can you maybe please advise as to why this has been happening if you know of it and if there is a work around it that doesn’t involve disabling protected view and having to go through all those additional steps just to open a folder?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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Is there an official case number or link to an article that I could show to customers that this is not an issue with our configuration?
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\word\ConfigContextData" /f reg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\excel\ConfigContextData" /freg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\powerpoint\ConfigContextData" /fpause
After deleting the registers, it starts working, but the bugs come back after the user logs in (no restart required). On some computers, after the keys come back, everything still works, on some it stops working. I currently have the problem on about 500 computers.
Problem with Office 2019 , 2021 , 2024 , Office 365
Hi Lieze Du Toit,
Thank you again for your detailed investigation and for continuing to investigate this issue so thoroughly.
You are absolutely right. Many users have reported the same problem recently, and it seems to be affecting a wide range of Office license types and environments. This strongly suggests a broader issue, likely introduced by a recent Office update.
To help move things forward, here are a few steps I kindly recommend:
I have seen a lot of users report this issue. We can see Nick T77 has already raised a support case with Microsoft and documented the steps taken so far, let wait to hear back on any updates from his side.
Then, could you please report the issue via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. You can do this by navigating to Health > Service Health > Report an Issue. This ensures the issue is formally logged and prioritized by Microsoft’s engineering team.
Finally, when you have a moment, it would be greatly appreciated if you could mark this thread as “Answered” on the Microsoft Community post. Doing so helps others who are experiencing the same issue find the discussion more easily. It also encourages more users to report the problem, which can help Microsoft prioritize and resolve it more quickly.
I’ve also updated the subject of this thread to “Word/Excel files can't be opened in Protected View” to help more users who may be experiencing the same issue find it more easily. I’ll continue to monitor for any official updates or workarounds from Microsoft and will share them with you as soon as they become available.
Please feel free to let me know if you need any further assistance. I’m happy to help.
Warm regards,
Alex – MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist
We are having exactly the same issue here and it appears other are as well.
MS Office - Opening files in Protected view is broken : r/sysadmin
We have tried the fixes suggested to the reg and they do work but we have narrowed this down we think to a recent build of office.
We know the Version 2408 (Build 17928.20440) 11^th^ February 2025 is fine.
With the latest builds we are seeing with the issue 2503 // 16.0.18623.20266 13th May 2025 and 2504 // 16.0.18730.20220 10th June 2025
We are also seeing the issue in Copilot generated documents as well as the office suite.
I have raised an MS support case for this as well and documented the step we have taken.
Hi Lieze Du Toit,
Welcome to Microsoft Community. Thank you for reaching out. I truly appreciate the effort you've put into exploring multiple solutions.
To help move this forward, could you try opening the files again with Protected View enabled If the issue persists, I recommend reporting it directly to Outlook support.
I’ve seen similar reports from other customers recently. When multiple users report the same issue, it helps the development team prioritize and resolve it more quickly.
Please feel free to reach out, if you have any questions or need further assistance
Warm regards,
Alex - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist