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
    2021-07-08T12:49:23+00:00

    The Office team is aware of this problem and working on a fix.

    Hi Suzanne,

    We have similar problem in our organisation which was first reported on Monday this week (5th July) and I wanted to check if this is the same thing as the OP reported.

    When our users try to do mail merge with a Word document template they receive a security notice popup like the one in the attached image.

    Image

    The fields in the Word document will not populate until "Yes" is clicked on the notice. This makes the application from which the merge is done appear frozen until the popup is addressed. One of the problem was users were not aware of this because the popup would not come up above other opened windows and was therefore hidden from view.

    Could you confirm if this is the issue Microsoft are looking into? We have been using the same setup for years and this only started recently, could have been the recent office update perhaps?

    We're running Office 2016 deployed with click to run installer.

    Cheers

    Tom

    EDIT

    I tested this on the most recent version (June 29th update, Version 2106 (Build 14131.20278)) and the issue is present.

    I rolled back to a previous version (June 18th update, Version 2105 (Build 14026.20308)) and this does not happen anymore.

    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?

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-07-09T14:11:53+00:00

    We have been inundated with support calls from customers having the same issue.

    When performing a mail merge where the document contains an IncludePicture code with either a full UNC path or a path using a mapped network drive, the security notice pop up is displayed. However this is displayed behind our application, which causes customers to believe our application has frozen.

    The mail merge process only continues after clicking yes on the security notice.

    This issue was first reported to us on Wednesday this week.

    Is this the same issue that's being investigated by the Microsoft Office team?

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-07-09T17:10:25+00:00

    It was helpful, but changing the value to 1 and decimal did not fix the problem. Do I have to restart the computer to make the fix stick?

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