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Cannot open some Office files after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10

Hi everyone,

This is Bryan from the Office team.  We are extremely sorry to learn that some of you are running into an issue with Office after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 where some of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are failing to open with various error messages, such as:

  • Word: “Word experienced an error trying to open the file”
  • Excel: “This file is corrupt and cannot be opened”
  • PowerPoint:
    • “The application was unable to start correctly"
    • “PowerPoint found a problem with <filename>"
    • “Sorry, PowerPoint can’t read <filename>"

[UPDATE - 8/25/2015]

On Monday, a fix went out to all Office 2013 Click-to-Run users that fixed the Protected View issue that was preventing some files from opening.  For those users, the Office applications would launch and even creating new documents worked fine; however, opening some files resulted in various error messages like above.  If you haven't already been prompted to install the August update, you can manually trigger by going into an Office application like Word, then select File > Account > Update Options > Update Now.

There are other known issues that could also cause similar error messages, but those are not related to the specific Protected View issue.  Teams are working hard to determine the root cause and resolve those issues.  For instance, if you are running Windows 10 and Office is running in Windows compatibility mode for a prior version, you likely will also experience issues.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused due to this issue!

Sincerely,

Bryan

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I am having this issue as well with Office Pro Plus 2016. Everything was working fine in December, but as soon as I started back at school last week is when I started having issues. I'm running Windows 10, I installed Office 2016 after upgrading to Windows 10 Pro. Also I have a classmate that is also running Windows 10 and Office Pro Plus 2016 as well but he is having no problems.

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I don't know if this will work for you because I did go back to Windows 8.1 but it seemed that Windows 10 changed some security settings in my documents Office 2013. Try this:

Go to Explorer and right click on the document files that won't open, click on the security tab and see if all the "permissions for SYSTEM" are checked. If not check them then click on apply.

Hope this helps and let me know if it does because I would like to upgrade to Windows 10 again. 

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Where is this fix??

1) repair office / that didn't work, had same version (2013) of Visio installed, so had to uninstall that first.

2) repair office / COULDN'T - it was already uninstalled unbeknown and not requested.

3)restart - then install Office 2013 - try to apply updates, already up to date.

5) restart again - TRY to open file

6) Doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work

7 lather, rinse, repeat??????????

*) Hey big a$$ company - try to get YOUR operating system to work with YOUR applications, is that tooo much to ask?

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See solution above
there is no solution above

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I had the same issue today (specifically, Excel coming up with “This file is corrupt and cannot be opened” when it tried to open some files in Protected view).  Yesterday I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

To fix my issue, I uninstalled Office then reinstalled it and the issue went away.

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Last updated January 22, 2024 Views 23,206 Applies to: