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

Hello All,

I recently purchased a new HP desktop, an Office 365 subscription, and have Trend Micro security software, so yesterday I found that many of my files, photos, screenshots, etc. had the box, and turned to you all to help me search for a solution. In my case, it was to resume computer synching:

Syncing will resume automatically after the Pause time has finished, or you can manually Resume syncing at any time.

1. Tap the paused OneDrive icon in the notification/menu area:
2. In the activity center, select More again and select Resume syncing or just tap the Pause button to get going again: My computer has Windows 11 as well and I was not particularly happy with the change, but so it goes,

Hope this helps...

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]

It happened to me after I changed my MS account password. I opened MS Word and logged in with the new password and problem solved.

I hope this helps.

In every case it is one of two things:

The user is not signed into the app for the cloud service where the files are hosted

Or

The files are marked for online only. For files stored in OneDrive, its Free Up space, in Dropbox, its online only.

What is the Brown File Box Icon on Files in Windows 11? | @Poremsky.com

I have exactly the same problem since my upgrade to Windows 11. Added information is that I am working from home, so I am not working on my company network, but am working on my private home network since my upgrade. I wonder if that could explain this (very inconvenient) occurence too ???

ps I hopen to come up with an answer coming Wednesday since I will have a try at solving this issue from the office then ;).

I bookmarked this conversation ;).

The same has happened to me. I have hundreds of Word docs I can't open and they have that little banker's box icon on them. It has happened since the switch to Windows 11.

Make sure you are 1) signed into the cloud service where they are hosted and 2) have the files set for offline access.