Word Always Opens Documents In Read-Only Mode / Subscription

I had a similar problem with Word opening in read-only mode.  I had tried everything I could think of.  It was very frustrating.  It turns out that it was caused by the preview pane in Windows Explorer.  Word picked up the preview as an open version of the file.  After I closed the preview pane, the problem ceased.  Simple solutions are the best.

Of course you should only reinstall as a last resort, when everything else fails. For now, it seems to be the nature of click-to-run installations that they sometimes break beyond repair.

Also, please note that posters in this forums are volunteers, with very few exceptions. I do not work for Microsoft. You should post feedback and suggestions for Word in the forum at http://word.uservoice.com.

Microsoft:  Please "STOP IT" with the "Re-install" nonsense.  NO ONE has time to perform re-installs.  Your software is a TOOL, not a LIFE.  We use it to be productive.  Re-installing is NOT productive.  Please learn how to get to the "ROOT CAUSE" of such issues, and FIX THEM AT THE SOURCE!  Last year, I paid for tech help from Microsoft, thinking that I would get ROOT CAUSE fixes from the "experts".  I found even level 2 techs to know less than I do, and I have found that I can do much better, when I have issues, if I search the web and fix it myself.  You are embarrassing yourself with these "re-install" answers.  STOP IT, STOP IT, AND STOP IT.

As you have noticed, an online repair is often more effective than a quick repair.

For what it is worth, many people have had problems running the click-to-run (virtualization) versions of Office 2013. Often, not only a repair but a complete reinstallation is required when problems occur. See https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/Repair-an-Office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b; at the bottom of the article it says the following:

If running Repair doesn’t solve the problem, you might need to uninstall and reinstall Office. See Uninstall Office 2010 or Uninstall Office 2013 or Office 365.

Reinstallation can then be done following the instructions at https://products.office.com/en-us/download-back-up-restore-microsoft-office-products.

I had all the same problem you are writing about. What solved it for me was a web-repair. No, the "normal" repair didn't do it, it had to be a web-repair. I use the term "solved" loosely ...

We had other problems with Outlook 2013, In the end, our solution was to "downgrade" to Office 2010. That has support for another 5 years during which time we can look for alternative solutions (LibreOffice, eMclient ...). Plus, we've had zero problems with 2010.

Our office is a State Pension Fund manager and we use[d] SBS2008 for an Active Directory domain. The problem discussed here and other problems our office has experienced started with the requirement to register the Office software using a Windows Live ID account. In my case I used a personal hotmail.com account, not knowing what I was in for. However, even if I registered each staff member with their own individual account (can you say "time consuming"?) that still creates problems. For example, the CFO's workstation is on its 3rd CFO. The director's workstation on its 2nd director. No big deal, it's a AD Domain, right? The new user just sits down and logs into the workstation. Done. Not so fast if Office 2013 is in the mix. We would not be able remove the previous user's Windows Live account so the new user (and the organization) would have to keep access to the ex-employee's Live account as you cannot transfer Office 2013 registration between Live accounts.

Even if we did that there are still problems. In the AD domain, if a user logs onto a different workstation and opens Office/Outlook there, the "account" defaults, not to the registered "Live" account, but to that user's domain account, e.g. username@hprs.local. If/when the user manually changes this back to the registered "Live" account, all the problem discussed in this message recur: bodyless emails from Word/Excel, read-only documents in My Documents, ... The only way to fix this is to re-web-install Office from the Internet, and NEVER switch accounts, EVER! This makes the whole roving profile notion of AD/DC unusable.

Apparently Office 2013 works fine on standalone workstations with one possible Live ID user and/or in the Cloud. As a public pension fund, we're never going to the Cloud (I wonder what banks and investment companies are doing?)  Office 2013 does not function well in a non-Outlook.com Active Directory environment.

With the dropping of the Small Business Server product, removal of Exchange from Server Essentials and the apparent direction Office is heading, is seems clear that Microsoft no longer considers small businesses and offices as part of its target market unless those entities are willing to go to the Cloud. Given the built-in data mining features of Windows 10, I'm skeptical about how "secure" my information is in Microsoft's cloud -- not to mention the nearly weekly break-in of high-profile private and government data stores. The Cloud and Office 2013 are not for us, and perhaps neither is Microsoft.

We will be looking at alternatives to Office, and possibly alternatives to Windows in the next several years.