I have a co-worker that I regularly share documents with to get her input. For some reason, a couple that I've worked on this week are restricted. She cannot open them from Outlook. This is how we always work and I never try to protect my documents. I did have a problem today with Office 365 hanging and seemingly only offering the "info" tab and maybe Word thinks I did something there but I didn't. This has never happened before.
How can I make my documents public and open to accessing and editing? I only release them to the public on our website as PDF files but that's not until we've finished editing.





By the same token, I wish that I could make Word 2016 stop assuming every Word document is read-only to start. That's almost never appropriate here. However, making my documents accessible by co-workers is more important.


Thanks for any suggestions that you may have.

Is it possible that the protected docs are saved in docm format? Outlook tries to protect users by restricting access to documents that contain macros.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Andrew,


Good suggestion and I didn't know that. However, none of them are .docm files. In fact, one is an .rtf file because I dislike sending documents that have more CSS and HTML than text in them. As I understand it, while an .rtf document can't do everything one might want, an .rtf file has much less unnecessary baggage.


Duncan

Duncan
RTF is hardly a step forward in terms of useless formatting included in the file - all the formatting information of every style (in use or not) is also in the rtf format and the graphics are all described as text as well which could massively blowout the filesizes.

Are you saying the recipient can't open the file direct from the email but if they detach the file and then try they can?

When sending many attachments through email, a hidden setting gets added to the file by the receiving application (ie Outlook). This setting tells Word to open the document in read-only mode in an effort to prevent possible virus infection on the receiver's machine. The same thing happens if you download a file from the internet. I know you feel like this is a bad thing but perhaps if your machine has been infected by a virus in the past you might feel otherwise.

Word is not assuming EVERY document is a potential source of virus - just the ones that come from email or web sources since those ones might not have come from a trusted supplier.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks, Andrew. I teach online. I regularly download zip files of student papers that are .docx documents all the time. In Word 2029, whenever I double-click on one of these documents in File Explorer, it comes up as read-only. Sometimes even my own work, if I've touched it on another computer, comes up read-only. Those are really excessive and I waste time because of this.



However, I figured it out. For a while, Word in Office 365 would not let me choose any tab besides info. I could not save or print. I am thinking that my efforts to get to another tab got the read-only flags set on these two documents instead. So, the problem went away.