Office for Mac - Protected view

Question

Hi,

I have the latest version of office (15.14) on my Mac

Every office attachment that is mailed to me opens in protected view mode. Where can I turn this off? its driving me crazy having to save the file to temp directory only to save it to the final directory when its done..

I have been looking online and seen that the Windows version has a Trust centre where you can turn it off, but i cant locate it in my mac version.

Any assistance would be highly appreciated!

Robert

Answer 1

Hi Robert,

You can't change that behavior of Outlook. By-the-way, it is Outlook controlling that and not Word... well kind of.

The behavior is part of the new security requirements that Apple has actually implemented for vendors, Microsoft being a vendor, who provide applications in the Apple Store for running on Mac devices. The general security term used is called "Sandboxing", which roughly means in this case that the end user, you, have to positively say that you are allowing an application to play in your sandbox. This is another measure to safeguard your system from malicious intrusions.

Outlook has a sandbox and so does each Office application. Outlook places the attachments in your Outlook sandbox (temporary folder) and when you open one of the attachments the application, in this case Word, sees that its stepped into Outlook's sandbox and I needs permission from you if it can stay and play.

Unfortunately, AFAIK there isn't a method provided where you can grant a global permission to an application to play in various sandboxes. I know on the PC via the Trust Center you can designate various places as trusted but that feature does not exist on the Mac. Remember, on a Mac, Microsoft is just another vendor and it must play by Apple's rules.

I'm not sure that a global permission will ever be allowed but you can lend your voice to a request for it by using the Smiley face control on Outlook's ribbon, change it to a Frown and tell Microsoft directly how you'd prefer the software to work. There is also a special sites for requesting features... www.outlook.uservoice.com, www.word.uservoice.com, www.excel.uservoice.com, www.onenote.uservoice.com.