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.
Wanted to give an update on this and what we discovered. We have first found out that there are a lot of reasons this error message can pop up, so this fix may not work for everyone.
What we discovered with our design clients that when they had over roughly 900 fonts activated on their computer, Office would throw up these errors, and Outlook would have trouble sending emails with attachments. When we disabled fonts or activated less than 900 (rough number was ~935 when I last checked), Office acted fine.
We have been working with Microsoft development on this issue, but no resolution is in sight. For now, we are having our users use Office 2011 for the time being and no issues there, but that won't be a permanent solution since 2011 will likely not be supported in High Sierra later this year, so I hope Microsoft gets it fixed.