I’ve saved several .docx files as boilerplates so that I don’t have to enter the same information every time. Apparently I accidentally clicked something, somewhere, so now everything is Read Only. This is not only for a specific boilerplate document, but also with another couple of documents I opened as tests.
How can I edit my own documents (i.e., turn off Read Only)? The only thing I see is in Info, where Always Open In Read Only is not turned on (I think).
Make sure it’s not Windows making it read-only at the file level, or (shudder) the disk hasn’t become read-only because of input/output errors (i.e., failing storage device).
I opened the file I’d saved as ‘Test’. In the View tab, I saw Edit Document. I tried that, and was able to edit. I’ve only tried a couple of files, but it looks like I can edit anything now.
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate MS programs?
What I found works is to right click on the file in File Explorer, click Properties on the bottom. At the bottom of the dialog box should be an area labeled Attributes. Uncheck the read-only box then click apply.
In addition to racer72’s solid advice (which I also had to do)
This has been happening to me: there’s an update that adjusted the Trust Center settings. It had re-checked by default from my do not use your ridiculous hypervigilant settings for files originating on my own damp personal computer to ‘you can look, but you cannot touch.’
Once I went through and reset everything in a blank document, and everything went back to behaving normally.
Something similar happened to a friend recently, because they had somehow logged out of their Microsoft account, so Word couldn’t find the appropriate license, and would only open things read-only.
Once they logged in by clicking the account icon (maybe in the upper right corner?) then everything started working again.
If you lose your MS-Office license you could try downloading Open Office which is free. It will open MS-Office files although it may not do so perfectly. Worth a try though.
One thing to check - Documents have a 255 character limit for filenames, INCLUDING the drive letter, path and folder. If you exceed the character limit, you can sometimes SAVE the document with that name, but you can’t open it again.
Did you create the form? Word has the ability to protect a form such that the only editing possible is text entry into the form. I seem to recall that the developer can also inadvertently protect everything in the form such that nothing is editable.