Microsoft Office
Last updated
Last updated
If you experience Microsoft Office applications (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook) opening documents read only, opening documents slowly, failing to open documents or failing to save documents, review the sections below for the most likely causes of the problems.
Ensure that always create backup is disabled on the Excel save as dialog. Go to the file menu and choose save as. Click Browse so the save as dialog box appears. Click the tools menu bottom right. Click the general options item. Then ensure always create backup is disabled:
If the document you are saving is an old XLS 95 format document then resave the document as XLS 97 format or the modern XSLX format. XLS format files can cause issues with co-authoring.
A plugin called “Solver” by Microsoft can cause Excel documents to open read only. Turn off the plugin. More information here on the Solver plugin can be found here:
If the UNC server name you have assigned to the network drive contains spaces, other non-alphanumeric characters, or conflicts with another server on the local network, it may cause issues, particularly for Excel.
Spaces in the server name may cause issues for hyperlinks in work sheets within an Excel document.
If the path to the document or folder to be opened in Office exceeds the 260 Windows path character limit then the document may not be opened or the containing folder may not be accessible to Office. E.g. If opening an Outlook MSG file that has a path longer than 260 characters, Outlook will show an error.
If documents open locked or read only, try disabling the Windows File Explorer preview pane as this has been reported to cause this problem.
We know some cases in which the above issues were caused by specific attack surface reduction (ASR) rules in Microsoft Defender.
In one known case (similar to example 1 above), the "Block Office communication application from creating child processes" rule caused the issue in Outlook.
In another case (similar to example 2), "Block all Office applications from creating child processes" caused the issue in Microsoft Office programs (e.g., in Excel and Word).
See especially these rules:
If the Word setting Always create backup copy is enabled and Word is , then you may experience issues when saving. To resolve, disable the setting. From Word, click File then Options. The select the Advanced tab on the popup dialog. Scroll down to the Save section and disable the Always create backup copy setting:
Check sections and on how to resolve.
Whilst Zee Drive and SharePoint Online support URL path lengths , Windows, and Office, have their own idiosyncratic path length limitations.
When using the Zee Drive feature and the recipient of the link subsequently clicking the link in an email in Outlook, the link may fail to open with an error from Outlook: Access denied.
This can be caused by a blocking child processes from launching which effectively stops the ZeeDrive.exe process from launching to process the hyperlink:
(rule's GUID 26190899-1602-49e8-8b27-eb1d0a1ce869).
(rule's GUID d4f940ab-401b-4efc-aadc-ad5f3c50688a).
