Office is Microsoft‘s office suite, one of the essential programs that is usually always installed on all computers. Microsoft usually updates its office suite frequently to add new functions and features and, of course, correct all kinds of bugs and errors that may appear in the suite or in any of the programs that are part of it, such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint. And while errors are normally rare, sometimes Microsoft must act urgently to correct an error that is preventing users from using their suite normally. And this is just what just happened.
This morning, Microsoft released two emergency patches . The first one was intended to solve the blue screen when trying to print in Windows , while the second one was aimed at solving a critical error in Office that prevented opening any document on the PC.
Protected View, or Protected View: the source of the problem
Protected view is a mode that Office has that allows us to open Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, in “read-only” mode . This prevents us from modifying any part of the document by mistake and, in addition, disables certain functions that can be dangerous. It is an essential measure to open any document downloaded from the Internet, OneDrive or received through email. Generally, we don’t have to do anything, Office itself recognizes that the document is external and opens it in that mode by default.
Due to a failure to load this function, users find that, when trying to open a document in this protected view mode, they see an error that they cannot open or save more documents because there is not enough memory or hard drive space .
After checking that there is plenty of space on the disks, and more than enough free RAM, it is clear that this is a problem with the office suite as such. And Microsoft has already fixed it.
Fixed issue: you don’t have to update Office
This error generally appears to users who have downloaded and installed any of the Microsoft Office applications from the Microsoft Store. Due to the error, when trying to open an Office document that activates Protected View, the system cannot allocate memory to it. Therefore, the above message appears.
Microsoft, aware of the problem, has chosen to use the Known Issue Rollback (KIR) technique to solve this problem. KIR is a system by which you can roll back bug fixes (not related to security) through Windows Update. Broadly speaking, it is as if the latest update was uninstalled, but automatically .
The fix is already reaching all users, although it may take up to 24 hours to spread to all computers. As we have said, we do not have to do anything, although if we are in a hurry we can restart the computer to try to receive it sooner. Or check the Windows health panel to detect and fix the problem as soon as possible.
