Shortcut to switch MS Office doc from 'read only' to writeable, when already open?

Question

Often I open an office document (via SharePoint) as read-only, only to later realize it needs editing. Is there an easy way to do this from within Office itself?

Current workaround is to close word/excel/etc. Start-Programs-Word/Excel, then go to the 'most recent' menu and open it again, at which point it should become writeable.

Answer 1

For this purpose, you don't need to close the Word/Excel program entirely. You can just close the document and then reopen it.

Here is the shortcut.

1. Ctrl-F4 for closing current document
2. Alt-F > 1 for opening the most recent document

Answer 2

I think normally when this happens, you would have realised only after doing a fair bit of editing.

One method (if you have write access to the directory) is to Save As the file to a different name, open the Save As function again to delete the original file and save the edited file as the original name again. Save As will allow you write a read-only file.