This is a strange one. Jane gets an email with a Word document attached. She gets "Word experienced an error trying to open the file" and suggests that it's permissions, hard drive space, or corrupted. Jane saves the attachment to her hard drive and gets the same error message when she tries to open it.

Jane forwards the email to Bob. Bob can open the attachment normally. Bob forwards Jane's email back to her and Jane can open the attachment normally.

My first thought is to re-install Office on Jane's computer, but I'd like to know if there is a different option.

On the affected computer, try right-clicking the icon for the downloaded document and choose Properties; in the Properties window, click Unblock and finally click Apply. Then can you open the document without problems?

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Something similar resolved the issue. We went into the Protected View settings in Word and unchecked all the settings. I'm still not 100% convinced this is the correct fix, but it allowed her to open the attachments.

Turning off (various options for) Protected view is the workaround presented months ago, and for some users that appears to be the only thing that works (even though the underlying issue is supposed to have been fixed in a recent update).

Thanks for the follow-up.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional