Office documents appear with an orange/yellow box in front of them. They won't open

Anonymous
2021-12-15T15:12:22+00:00

I recently upgraded to Windows 11 pro. I reviewing my locally stored documents, several of them have an altered ICON with what looks like a file storage box to the left of the standard application ICON. None of these files will open by double-clicking. I chatted with MS support this morning and the agent couldn't figure it out either. Fortunately, most of these documents are also on OneDrive, but I have >100 with this issue and it will take time to find and restore a working copy.

Has anyone seen this?

Thanks,

Tom

[Moved from Word / For business / Windows]

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-08-21T12:04:06+00:00

    My solution was to login to One Drive and let it sync for a couple of hours while I was away doing something else. After a couple of sessions like this eventually my files were back in full view. The problem stemmed from the upgrade to Windows 11.

    Tom

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  2. Diane Poremsky MVP 17,531 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-08-21T04:35:49+00:00

    If the icon is on OneDrive files - signing in should fix it. If its in another cloud service, I don't have a solution.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-08-21T03:14:36+00:00

    What is the solution / how do we remove this icon without downloading every file?

    The icon makes it very difficult to see the icon identifying the "file type".

    I know certain files are offline/downloaded when needed, I don't need Microsoft to tell me that. I would much rather be able to easily see the file-type instead.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-08-02T19:41:28+00:00

    Hi Tom,

    Indeed, once I resumed computer syncing, the 'box' was removed from all documents and files, and all were accessible. Thanks for the reply.

    Cynthia

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-08-02T19:04:43+00:00

    Cynthia:

    The Windows 11 transition has a few wrinkles and artifacts that can cause angst and frustration. In my case it was the very large number of documents that failed to sync when updating the OS. Not wishing to hold court with the OS and One Drive while it slowly updated all files, I triggered an overnight process that got me thru >450 documents and minimized (not ended) my frustration. I had a couple of calls with MS support which really didn't get to the root of the problem as neither was able to identify the miscreant icon. This was eventually identified by a couple of folks in the community forum with a suggested resolution path.

    Hope your success with same is positive.

    All the best,

    Tom

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