This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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.
Dear Jim,
I appreciate your desire to help, but as other people have said, there is a single problem that hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of Mac MS Word 2015 users are having that is identical, regardless of the cause. Whenever we try to open a Word document, we get the message that we don't have permission to open the file.
However, News Flash!!
The problem, which has been happening on my computer for almost a year suddenly, today, stopped happening. I can now open all my word documents without a problem. I have no idea why it's fixed, but I sure am glad it is!!!