Missing Registry subkey

Question

The following Registry subkey is missing from Word 2010:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Word\Options

DisableSaveAsLossWarningOpenDocumentText

The absence of this means I cannot turn the message on & off despite the fact that the Microsoft support tells me that I can.  I asked a colleague to look in his Registry and similarly the subkey for Word was missing.

It’s interesting to note that for both Powerpoint and Excel the counterpart Registry subkeys are present and work.  Looks suspiciously like a programming omission to me.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

I think you misunderstand the article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970020). That registry entry doesn't exist -- for any of the Office programs -- until you save a document in ODF, check the "don't show this again" box in the warning, and click Yes or No. Then the program creates the entry in the Options hive with the value 1 (meaning "disable the warning").

If you do that, the warning won't appear again, so you can't see the box to uncheck it. The information in the article is about how to change the registry value to 0, so the warning will appear again.

Of course, if you want to prevent the warning from appearing even the first time, you can do that by manually creating the DisableSaveAsLossWarningOpenDocumentText entry in each of the three Options hives (right-click > New > DWORD) and setting its value to 1.

Answer 2

Dear Jay

Thank you for your most helpful response.

Many of my written documents are modifications to existing documents.  I used the warning to alert me to the fact that if I continue, the existing file will be overwritten, so I always used “save as” rather than “save” in my 2003 and previous versions of Word.

Unfortunately however, my 2010 copy of Word has never had this facility from new although both Excel and Powerpoint do.  So my only wish is to get that “save as” warning box to display in Word 2010.  But since the subkey isn’t there I can’t set its value to zero as suggested in the support document.

Can I just carefully type the missing subkey into the Registry and set it to zero to get the warning box to display?

Answer 3

Yes, that's what I meant by "manually creating the DisableSaveAsLossWarningOpenDocumentText entry".

To avoid typing mistakes, copy the name from this message first, so you can later paste it into the registry entry's name.

In RegEdit, open the Options key for Word. In the right-hand pane, right-click a blank area and click the New item. Then click the DWORD item in the secondary menu.

The new entry appears with the name "New Value #1". When it first appears, the name is selected for editing, and you can paste the desired name there. If you've done something else in the meantime and the name isn't editable, right-click it and choose Rename to make it editable and paste the desired name.

The entry's initial value will be zero, which is what you want, so you can just close RegEdit.

Answer 4

Dear Jay

I have made the entry into the Registry with the following results.  When logged in with administrator privileges the entry appears in Word Options in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_USERS.  When logged in using my normal working account the entry appears in a similar place in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

The warning box still does not appear.

I am concerned about the logical inconsistency of the explanation and the symptoms.  If, as you say either the warning box shows or there is a Registry entry enabling you to reinstate it then the situation with my (and others I have spoken with) computer whereby there is neither warning box nor Registry entry from new is anomalous.

Regards

Chris

Answer 5

I can't explain that. The warning should appear if (a) the registry entry does not exist OR (b) if the entry does exist and its value is zero. The only way the warning should not appear is if the entry exists and its value is 1.

The only other suggestion I can make is to verify that you're looking at the correct key, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Word\Options. Or you can click the top item (Computer) in the left panel of RegEdit and start a search for the entry name, DisableSaveAsLossWarningOpenDocumentText -- maybe you'll find an instance of it in an unexpected place.