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Dealing With File Open Issue In Word 2010 Beta

By Jason Slater
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When opening some documents Microsoft Word 2010 Beta an error may appear stating “Word experienced an error trying to open the file. Try these suggestions.”, your first though might be this has something to do with compatibility, or a different version of Word – however did you download the file from the Internet? If so, there may not be a problem at all – Word may just be trying to protect you.

Microsoft Word 2010 Error www.jasonslater.co.uk

The suggestions include checking the file permissions, ensuring sufficient memory is available, and opening the file with a text recovery converter. However, there may be little wrong with the file itself. You can often check this by attempting to open the file in WordPad. WordPad may complain about the odd graphics filter but see if it opens the file itself.

Next, open Windows Explorer and navigate to the file, right click and select Properties. At the bottom of the Properties tab you should see a Security section which states “This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.” – if you are happy with the risk of opening this file click the Unblock button then click OK.

 Office 2010 Properties

Try opening the file again in Word 2010 Beta and all should be well.

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4 comments so far

  • Ty says:

    Excellent! I had to uninstall/reinstall the Office 2010 beta earlier today and had this problem. Figures that it’s so simple. Thank you for the solution!

    If I may ask, though, is there a way to unblock all downloaded documents or set them to not be blocked by default? Before I reinstalled the Office beta, I never received this error with documents I downloaded (that I know are safe). Now, those same documents appear to have been blocked, and I don’t want to have to deal with doing this for what may be hundreds of documents.

    If you could send me an email (unless a reply here notifies me by email), that would be greatly appreciated.

  • Adaz says:

    Thank you!!! Almost pulled out all of my hair

  • Lee says:

    Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

    I saw this with Office 2010 Beta and just chalked it up to Beta issues. I just downloaded 2010 GA from Technet and started seeing the problem again and was worried I was going to need to revert to 2007. It turns out that unblocking the file (routed through internal and extenral email) in the file properties did the trick. It would be nice if Microsoft would think to update their “Tips” to include this as a possible root cause.

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