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Anders Linner's avatar
Anders Linner
Copper Contributor
Jul 17, 2020

Office documents in a SharePoint Library opens in Read Only mode, when opened with Office Desktop

Hi, 

 

We are experiencing a rather complex bug/issue in SharePoint which we cannot seem to figure out. We cannot find any forum posts covering this exact issue either. 

 

Symptom: When opening any Word, Excel or PowerPoint files from a particular SharePoint Site Collection Library, using Office Desktop, the files are Read-Only. 

Remarks:

  • When opening in Online Office programs, the files can be edited with no issues. This only occur when opening using Desktop apps. 
  • Our current Office version is 2005
  • This particular library has custom metadata columns. We have tested to make these columns optional, and also reviewed whether they can cause potential compatibility issues in Office Desktop programs. 
  • The two users who have been used for testing this are both Site Collection Admins and also Site Owners. 
  • There are no Label settings
  • Documents are not stored as records
  • We have never experienced this issue before. To that note it has been a while since the last time we tested using metadata columns

Screenshots of configuration are attached.

 

We would really appreciate any help with this. If we can't resolve it, we'll have to delete this Library, wiping a good amount of hours worth of work and potentially running into the same issue in the future. 

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