Grant File Access: Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges

Anonymous
2015-07-20T23:38:33+00:00

I am unable to open some Word documents due to permission issues.

I used Disk Utility to repair permissions and created a new profile and still have the following problem.  See three screenshots below:

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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John Korchok 235.9K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2017-11-30T22:29:05+00:00

You'll most likely find that you must repeat this every month, when you install an update. Every time I've tested the updating process, the fonts get reinstalled in the package.

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John Korchok 235.9K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2018-01-04T22:31:59+00:00

It's worth a try creating a new user account on your colleague's Mac, sign in to it and test Office. If it works, you know it's some degree of corruption in the old account's installation.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has never published really complete uninstall/reinstall directions for Office 2016 for Mac. I think it likely they don't know how.

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Anonymous
2018-03-21T21:14:20+00:00

After working with my client for over a year, I have finally got higher ups in Microsoft Mac Development to acknowledge this bug and they are currently working on it. At least in our instance, the issue stems from activating too many fonts with a 3rd party font manager like Suitcase of FontExplorerX. The amount of fonts is usually in the 3k range, which then causes Office 2016 to act all loopy and throw up random error messages.

If you aren't using a 3rd party font manager, then your issue could be different. For those that are using a 3rd party font manager, Microsoft Developers are working on this and they expect a fix in the next couple of releases. I'll keep this thread up to date as I find out more information.

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Anonymous
2018-02-02T16:13:48+00:00

I had this problem too and it comes back sometimes after an Office update, like the most recent 16.9.1.

What I do is clearing the MS-Office font caches with Cocktail and then restart my Mac immediately. Word then opens the documents without error.

Worked for me with 10.10 Yosemite and 10.11 El Cap / Mac Pro 2008. I'm using FontExplorer X Pro 6.

Hope it helps.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T20:44:39+00:00

    Hi Bill,

    I really appreciate your help.

    However, I don't understand why I'm not having this problem with documents from ANY OTHER software manufacturer, and even with other MS products, like my very old excel and powerpoint files opening in Excel and Powerpoint 2016. It's ONLY with Word documents in Word 2016. Why would the sandboxing feature ONLY affect MS Word and NOTHING else. That doesn't make any sense at all!!!

    I literally have thousands of Word documents and it would take more than two full days to reorganize them into manageable chunks within the documents folder. I won't be doing that, and will instead continue to just use MS Word 2011.

    If the problem doesn't occur with Excel or any other software, I really question your claim that MS can't fix the problem.

    -Jonathan

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