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Since the reviewing, editing, and viewing feature I cannot copy and paste from a read only document. I have to gain access to even copy and paste. My job requires me to copy and paste from upwards of 10 documents. Since word won't let me copy and paste from a read-only or viewing document I have to check them out of our SVN every time. Does anyone know how to turn this feature off and go back to the original word?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
This new feature is incredibly annoying. I don't understand why Microsoft want to add features that over-complicate Word and detract from the usability of the application. At the very least there should be a way to disable new options that one person thinks are a great idea but drive the actual users up the wall.
There definitely needs to be a way to disable this feature. Just the fact of having users on the same build number but getting a different feature set is annoying enough, but when we have a feature like this causing issues it's a nightmare.
This feature is poorly implemented and causing many issues. Many of my clients are large law firms, and I'm starting to get reports of issues with lots of addins and macros that I have written for them - but it is only affecting some of their users. It's taken a while to work out that it is this feature causing the problem.
As a developer, I cannot find any documentation on this feature. How do we programmatically find out if this feature in available, and what it is set to for that document? I've tried the previous document properties like ActiveDocument.ReadOnly or ActiveDocument.PretectionType and nothing matches. Plus the errors coming back are inconsistent at best.
Checking to see if anyone has a workaround or has heard of an update from Microsoft? My program has a function to generate word documents that is not functional with this new "feature". Our only option has been to roll back the update and change the update channel. At some point it will start hitting all of my customers. Thanks
I can only tell you that Microsoft has been made aware of the severity of the problem and is supposedly working on a solution.
Thanks Suzanne - that's some positive news.
I had two support calls logged with Microsoft detailing two different issues with this feature which they have literally just closed on me saying I can't log developer issues that way and to use the forums instead. And that's even after doing a remote session with their support people to show them the issue, and they ponder what I've shown them for almost a week and then just close the calls. It's so hard to get an issue escalated.
I have also found that using Documents.Add using a document that is read only will also fail if this feature is enabled - Word returns a runtime error 5097. This also occurs for some files in directories with limited access (like the default workgroup templates location) Move the files to another location and they work. It's breaking simple VBA code I've had running for over 20 years.
And it's also frustrating that this feature is only on for some users - there is no consistency at all. I've tried asking for a non-developer solution of being able to turn it off. That would be fine as a workaround for now.