How to turn on/off the Protected View feature on Microsoft Office

When opening documents, documents, Word, Excel or Power Point spreadsheets from unknown sources, a feature from the Office 2013 version called Protected View will protect you from potential risks, preventing errors. Malicious code and viruses when opening documents. This is quite great, however, when the user opens a document or document, Protected View will only allow reading and cannot be edited directly, but must click the Enable Editing button.

Why should you use Protected View?

Protected View protects you from viruses, malware and threats that may be encountered when opening Word/Excel files from unknown sources.

This mode is also quite suitable for spreadsheets and documents that you only want to open for reading and do not need to edit.

How to switch to editing mode of a Protected View file

Protected View mode is enabled by default . So, whenever you open a file that did not originate from a website or received via email, you will automatically open the file in Protected View mode.

When opening a file in this format, a warning line will appear along the top of the open document with an Enable Editing button. Click on it and the program will allow you to edit the document after reviewing it.

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One type of edit is a document that is opened as read-only with some content not displayed.

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If it is in this format, you should save the document as another copy to make working easier.

How to disable Protected View mode

Although this feature is quite useful, it also causes considerable difficulty for users because the content in texts and documents cannot be edited immediately. If you want to turn off the Protected View feature on Office , you can refer to the following method.

Note:

The following instructions take Excel 2016 as an example, follow the same steps with Word and Power Point to turn off the Protected View feature .
You should consult your IT or network administrator if you do this on a shared system, because it will likely bring potential risks.

To turn off Protected View , follow these steps:

Step 1: Click File on the top left from the taskbar.

Step 2: In the new interface, from the menu on the left, click on Options .

Step 3: In the Excel Options interface , also in the left menu, click Trust Center .

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Step 4: Next, select Trust Center Settings…

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Step 5: Switch to the Trust Center interface , click on the Protected View category .

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Step 6: There are 3 Protected View modes here: files originating from the Internet, unsafe locations and Outlook attachments . Please disable all 3 by unchecking each option if you do not want Protected View to interfere with your files in the future.

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Thus, we have disabled the Protected View feature on Office. When you reopen the document, the Enable Editing button will no longer appear , so you can edit directly. In particular, the documents we download from the internet have also had the Protected View protection feature removed .

Protected View can be considered a very useful feature that helps protect users from potential threats when opening documents from unknown sources. This mode is very popular when working with Office on mobile devices or accessing files in infrequently used public locations.

Protected View

Kareem Winters

Update 27 October 2023

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