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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:
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I seemed to have resolved the issue I was having with permissions.
In Word, I specified the File Location [Word>Preferences>File Locations] to the folder where my misbehaving word docs were located. I clicked on Workgroup Templates, then Modify, then navigated to my folder. In finder, you may need to use command+shift+G to bring up the "Go to the Folder" menu if your word docs are hidden in the "private" folder.
This fixed my issue.
This seems to me to be an extreme fix that I would not recommend to other users.
The Workgroup templates path should be blank unless set to a network location that contains only templates. It should never come into play unless a file you open has an Attached Template. You can look to see if this is the case if you can get the document open: in Toole>Templates and Add-Ins, either the Document Template will be something other than "Normal.dotm" or there will be an entry in the "Global Add-ins" box below it.
Unfortunately, there is no way in Mac Word to discover whether a document has an Attached Template unless you can get the document open (say, in Word 2011, or in PC Word).
However, Attached Templates are extremely rare these days, so I would be surprised if that is the case.
Theoretically, "no" software should ever have access to the /var folder unless the operating system sends it there. Certainly Word should not be playing in there.
So I would treat this suggestion with reserve (in other words, "Don't do it unless you are comfortable rebuilding your computer from a bare hard disk -- because you may have to!").