Cannot open some Office files after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10

Anonymous
2015-08-06T07:01:10+00:00

Hi everyone,

This is Bryan from the Office team.  We are extremely sorry to learn that some of you are running into an issue with Office after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 where some of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are failing to open with various error messages, such as:

  • Word: “Word experienced an error trying to open the file”
  • Excel: “This file is corrupt and cannot be opened”
  • PowerPoint:
    • “The application was unable to start correctly"
    • “PowerPoint found a problem with <filename>"
    • “Sorry, PowerPoint can’t read <filename>"

[UPDATE - 8/25/2015]

On Monday, a fix went out to all Office 2013 Click-to-Run users that fixed the Protected View issue that was preventing some files from opening.  For those users, the Office applications would launch and even creating new documents worked fine; however, opening some files resulted in various error messages like above.  If you haven't already been prompted to install the August update, you can manually trigger by going into an Office application like Word, then select File > Account > Update Options > Update Now.

There are other known issues that could also cause similar error messages, but those are not related to the specific Protected View issue.  Teams are working hard to determine the root cause and resolve those issues.  For instance, if you are running Windows 10 and Office is running in Windows compatibility mode for a prior version, you likely will also experience issues.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused due to this issue!

Sincerely,

Bryan

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-08-19T13:56:05+00:00

    Hi,

    Sorry to know that you are facing issues with unable to work with office applications after upgrading to Windows.

    We are investigating and are reaching out to several users to help provide us some diagnostic information.

    Thanks you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-08-19T14:29:09+00:00

    Do you have a time frame for this? I have been watching this unfold since day one when I experienced this problem with word 2013, 7pro to 10pro... One thing I noticed, when I did an online repair of office,  while I was waiting for it to finish, I started word and in the startup box, It said streaming something I cant remember what... But while this was happening word worked fine, i.e; I could open any file from uni, local, whatever!!!??? Please Help.. Oh, my original and current error, "were sorry word has run into an error....blah de blah..

    Thanks, Cozza

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-19T15:39:22+00:00

    really sucks!!!!!!

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-08-19T16:12:15+00:00

    Go to settings> update security>recovery>go back to previous version

    If you Google it there is a utube video and several other sites showing you how to do it

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-08-19T16:13:03+00:00

    Will we be informed when this problem is fixed?

    I would like to upgrade to Windows 10 but after one week I couldn't deal with the Office 2013 and Quicken 2009 problems. I did upgrade to Quicken 2015 when I found out that Windows 10 wasn't compatible with Quicken 2009

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