“You are not allowed to edit this selection because it is protected.” but only since Office 2013?

Question

We\'ve had these few lines of code running happily in our applications for several years (and in several versions of Office, 2003, 2007, 2010 etc). Purpose is to perform a kind

Answer 1

In desperation, trawling for answers even in blog posts and discussions far removed from this particular error it seems there's been a change in Office 2013 to the default treatment of the ReadingLayout.

Introducing the line w.ActiveWindow.View.ReadingLayout = False seems to have solved our problem.

Answer 2

You don't specify how the document is opened, but a problem I had was resolved by following the answer accepted on this question.

Switching from WordApplication.Documents.Open() to WordApplication.Documents.Add() resolved the issue for my application.

Answer 3

We had some C# automation that worked fine with Word 2007/2010, but stopped with Word 2013 with the same "You are not allowed ..." warning.

Following steps on this site solved the issue.

Basically there are two settings to check:

• File – Options – General. Uncheck “Open E-Mail attachments and other uneditable files in reading view”
• File – Options – Trust Center – Trust Center Settings. Select Protected View, then clear all the checkboxes.

Answer 4

When you open a document, specify that it should not be opened as read-only

object readOnly = false; 
doc = word.Documents.Open(ref path, ref miss, ref readOnly, ...);

Answer 5

This has been happening to me for the past two days (while creating a dotm template) and what fixed it for me was to create a new normal.dotx! Don't know if that will work for others or not, but it did for me!

Answer 6

Tried most of the suggestions above but I found this fixed the problem. We were opening the doc as a template in read-only with a password. So couldn't use 'Add'

Documents.Open(strTemplateDoc, ReadOnly:=True, PasswordDocument:=strDocPassword, Visible:=False)

Setting the View.Type to wdNormalView stopped the error "You are not allowed to edit this selection because it is protected"

wdDocPage.ActiveWindow.View.Type = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdViewType.wdNormalView

Thanks to all the others for their suggestions - they helped a lot.