How do I disable "Microsoft Word Security Notice" pop-up

Anonymous
2021-07-07T17:12:32+00:00

I am extremely frustrated, to the point that I want to just switch over to Apple products the way everyone tells me to.

For no reason - (at least nothing I did), Microsoft appears to have installed some type of software on my computer that whenever I copy and paste into a MS Word document, I get an annoying pop-up:

Microsoft Word Security Notice

Microsoft Office has identified a potential security concern.

This document contains fields that can share data with external files and websites. It is important that this file is from a trustworthy source.

Choosing Yes will enable updating all fields in this file until you close it.

And I say --- duh! This is what I was trying to do. But why do I have to be annoyed each and every time I do anything with MS Word products??? Oh.. I'm using Windows 10 Professional and a Microsoft 365 account through my school

How can I fix it? Or should I just throw this Dell Latitude Laptop out the window and start over with an iBook?

Arrrrrgh.

****@*****.***.edu

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Jay Freedman 208.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2021-07-08T15:04:48+00:00

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a security feature which was enabled after the last update. Is there a way to disable this warning when doing mail merges?

It is a bug in the last update, and it is what Microsoft's team is working to resolve. When the fix is released, the security notice should not pop up when it isn't appropriate, i.e., during a merge or after pasting a benign object from another location. Until that fix arrives, though, the rollback that you did is the only way to avoid the notices.

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Anonymous
2021-07-16T06:16:21+00:00

I just updated my MS Office and this problem has been solved.

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-09-24T12:23:55+00:00

    You are right with "Things should just work they did ..".

    But in the meantime you can work around this by setting the registry key before running your job (reports or what else) and delete the key or set it to 0 (or previous value) after finishing. It's a current user key, so it's not a problem doing it by your application.

    Toni

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-09-24T12:06:28+00:00

    Also it might work, this is no solution for us. Our software has an MS Office interface doing several kinds of reports. We can't force all our customers (some are large companies) to change their Office security settings to a lower level. Things should just work like they did before without the need of changing settings.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-09-24T11:50:26+00:00

    Toni,

    Please accept my apologies.

    Tonisa's suggested solution of 16-September does work with Word Version 2108 Build 14326.20404

    I had mistakenly used the Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Security hive in the registry. The correct setting is:

    Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Security

    Thank you for your help. I will roll-out this fix before too many of my clients well structured mail merge templates are botched by removing INCLUDETEXT fields.

    Kind regards

    Neil

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