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I'm working on Win10 with a newly installed and activated Office 2019. It works fine mostly, except that files often open as 'read only' even when newly created just 10 minutes earlier as the same user. Sometimes the file can be opened a few times normally, then it changes to read only. Once opened 'as read only' Word offers to save them to a new name in a different location. However this also does not work, upon trying Word complains it does not have writing rights to any directory chosen (Desktop, Documents).

If Word (or Excel, PowerPoint etc) is started with Admin rights it works as expected.

I checked all the folders (Desktop, Documents etc), and the one and only user on the system has full rights to them.

Why does Office somehow loose access rights to normal folders such as the Desktop, seemingly at random for files that have been created with the same Office and user? It's also specific files, if the problem occurs for fileA.docx on the Desktop, fileB.docx may be fine even though it's also on the Desktop.

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    Do you have any installed add-ons for Office or Word? – harrymc Oct 14 '19 at 20:23
  • No, the Dropbox one was apparently installed by Dropbox but I removed that with no changes to the problem. – ShellfishGene Oct 15 '19 at 14:39
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    Very strange. When you run Office, in the Task Manager is the user-name yourself for the program (Details view, column User name)? – harrymc Oct 15 '19 at 14:44
  • Yes, there is only one user on the machine anyway... – ShellfishGene Oct 16 '19 at 19:35
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    Is this happening on all local locations, or only on special ones such as network shares? – harrymc Oct 16 '19 at 19:37
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Thist was "solved" by installing the 64 bit version of Office instead of 32. Does not make much sense to me, but now it works as expected.

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  • This means it just needed a re-installation. A repair might have been enough. – harrymc Oct 23 '19 at 17:28
  • Repair did not work... – ShellfishGene Oct 24 '19 at 18:12
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When you get the dreaded 'read only' msg., it says you can do a work-around by giving the file a new name. I do this by 'renaming' the file by simply adding any new character to the existing file name - an additional space or two between as few as two words is an example of adding an additional character.

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  • That doesn't solve the problem. – RalfFriedl Nov 24 '19 at 0:51

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