“Protected View Has Stopped Working” Message After Last Round of Office Updates

If you’re experiencing Protected View problems opening Office files after the last round of updates from Microsoft, there’s a solution though it’ not a great one – particularly from the company touting better security during a worldwide event this week.

In some cases, if you have downloaded a Microsoft Office file from the Internet and try to open it, you be presented the following error message followed by the suggestions for fixing the error.

The image examples show this error for Microsoft Word, but it can happen with any Microsoft Office suite product. I’ve personally experienced it with the 2016 versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The problem is the restricted view that Office places on documents that it detects were downloaded from the Internet. The additional security and care is valuable until documents will simply not open and work can’t be done. The funniest part about this is that it even happens to documents that have been saved to OneDrive (which is now one of the default save locations for Office 2016).

To fix this until Microsoft delivers a fix, you have to remove one of the in Trust Center Settings for each Office product.

To do this…

To best protect yourself, you should probably consider going through the process of disabling and reenabling for each and every file you need to download and open from the Internet. And, only open those files that you deem trustworthy.