Additional permissions are required to access the files (Word for Mac)

Anonymous

Split from this thread.

Hello

I am trying to open a docx file and I keep getting a message that additional permissions are required to access the files.

After selecting the grant access option I get the message "Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges" and I cannot open the document.

My current version of office is 16.24

Version of Mac is 10.14.4

When I perform a computer restart I can open my Word docs then, after a while, I can't open any docs.

attached is a screen shot of the error message.

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Anonymous

This is a fix, but the specific steps are a bit drastic by removing your whole keychain, which contains a lot of other useful things.

You can fix this in a different way without messing up your whole keychain.

Make sure the office Applications are closed.

Within KeyChain Access, just search for ADAL, remove the entries starting with

MicrosoftOffice as the kind plus com.microsoft.adalcache

The 16.27 update release July 16 2019 should fix most of the issues with this Bug.

Additionally the following are some fixes that will fix this specific error and similar permission errors with Office Mac products

Update Office to 16.27 or later (choose Check For Update from the Help menu in any Office Application)
Remove Microsoft ADAL keychain entries (search for ADAL in the keychain and remove those items)
Remove the securebookmarks preference files

Press Command+Shift+G in the finder then paste the following

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Preferences/

Within this folder remove the following file

com.microsoft.Excel.securebookmarks.plist

Press Command+Shift+G again and then paste in the following

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/

Within this folder remove the following file

com.microsoft.Word.securebookmarks.plist

After any and all of the above steps, please reboot your machine (manually removing preferences and keychain items does not guarantee they will be recreated properly unless you restart)

Additionally if the files are located on a shared drive, the files may be open by someone else. The other users may also just have the files highlighted in the finder (whereby it is then generating a preview of the file and therefore the file is marked as open)

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79 additional answers

Anonymous

2019-07-19T01:11:32+00:00

This does not fix it. FYI
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Anonymous

2019-07-19T11:54:04+00:00
The 16.27 update release July 16 2019 should fix most of the issues with this Bug.

Additionally the following are some fixes that will fix this specific error and similar permission errors with Office Mac products

Update Office to 16.27 or later

Remove Microsoft keychain entries (as above)

Remove the securebookmarks preference files

/bin/rm ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.securebookmarks.plist

/bin/rm ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.securebookmarks.plist

Additionally if the files are located on a shared drive, the files may be open by someone else. The other users may also just have the files highlighted in the finder (whereby it is then generating a preview of the file and therefore the file is marked as open)
On whose authority are you making these assertions? The release notes for 16.27 don't mention anything beyond "performance improvements". Plus your additional notes clearly indicate that this is no "fix". Requiring the user to experiment with destructive commands in Terminal and with his keychain entries is not a "fix" by any stretch of the imagination.

Either you are with Microsoft and then you need to do much better, or you are not and you're just misleading other people.
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Anonymous

2019-07-21T09:05:49+00:00

On whose authority are you making these assertions? The release notes for 16.27 don't mention anything beyond "performance improvements". Plus your additional notes clearly indicate that this is no "fix". Requiring the user to experiment with destructive commands in Terminal and with his keychain entries is not a "fix" by any stretch of the imagination.

Either you are with Microsoft and then you need to do much better, or you are not and you're just misleading other people.

As part of the Mac Systems Administrators community, we are in frequent contact with the Mac team at Microsoft who provide me these details.

I am no part of Microsoft, and I believe these these notes that I posted above go a long way to fixing the problems for many. They have certainly helped my clients.

The root cause of these permissions errors are many and varied. This may not be a complete list of fixes, but is certainly better than most of the other comments in this thread, including yours and those from the Microsoft team — comments that provide no solutions, no constructive advice, and are going off on tangents that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Perhaps you could try these things first and let me know if they don't work for you, or come back and thank me when they do. Deal?
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Anonymous

2019-07-21T09:16:25+00:00

Hi e_Whizz,

We appreciate you sharing the solution that worked for you to the rest of the community. We will mark your previous reply as answer so that other users can check out the steps you listed and hopefully also resolve the issue on their end.

Regards,

Sheen
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