Disable Protected View
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How to Remove/Disable Protected View / Enable Editing (Office 365)

What the hell is Protected View and how can I get rid of it?

Have you wondered like 100 million other users what the heck this is?

Disable Protected View
It’s a grotesque and useless thing called “Protected View”. And until today, nobody knows why Microsoft has introduced this nonsense.

Basically, when you open documents, an ugly yellow dialog box pops up on the top of your Excel or Word document telling you to “Enable Editing” of your document, if you want to be able to edit it. Of course it makes absolutely no sense to ask such a question. Of course I want to edit it you morons. Why would I open it, then?

Anyways, now that is out of the way, let’s see how we can disable this crap.

Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to find it, so you have to go through a couple of steps:

How to disable protected view

  1. Go to your menu “File”
  2. Click “Options”
  3. Click “Trust Center”
  4. Click “Trust Center Settings…”
  5. Click “Protected View”
  6. Disable all check boxes

If you hate Microsoft as much as I do, please leave your insults below in the comment section.

Thank you.

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32 comments for “How to Remove/Disable Protected View / Enable Editing (Office 365)

  1. Ariel,
    September 4, 2023 at 2:30 pm

    I’ve been annoyed by this feature of MS for so long. Thank you so much for sharing.

  2. Gillian Wallace,
    May 31, 2023 at 1:57 am

    I cannot thank you highly enough. This used to be easy to turn off – and yeah, I had done it until bloody Microsoft did an update and turned the damn thing back on and hid how to get rid of it. It was driving me crazy!!

    So I’m very very grateful!!

  3. enemene123,
    February 16, 2023 at 2:22 pm

    Stupid User: I hate Microsoft, what is this stupid warning message, I want it gone!!!!
    Also stupid user: I clicked opened this funny looking macro excel file from an unknown sender, I wonder why my PC is getting encrypted >:(

    If y’all would stop falling for phishing and malware the security measures would not have to be so intrusive.

  4. Angry Employee,
    October 27, 2022 at 9:15 am

    Every excel file generated by the software I use at work opens in protected view, with all of these boxes unticked. I have to open at least 40 of these each day on a garbage computer that takes about 5 seconds for each of the two clicks to get through. 10 seconds 40 times a day is 2000 seconds (33.333333 minutes) a week. That’s two hours of employee time a month. Granted, this is partially because of the crap computer, but this is an entirely avoidable additional time waste. I’M GENERATING THIS FILE, WHY WOULD I NEED TO BE PROTECTED FROM IT?

    • KM,
      January 26, 2024 at 3:59 pm

      It worked!!

  5. Siranush,
    June 10, 2022 at 6:09 am

    Thank yooouuu

  6. Mike V,
    January 30, 2022 at 8:27 pm

    I have a feeling that someone is paying people at MS and other tech companies to write the new applications in a way, as to make us hate technology. Something that was useful years ago is now increasingly difficult and annoying to work with.
    Yes, I do hate MS!!!

  7. R McConnaughey,
    October 4, 2021 at 4:11 pm

    Thank you for your instructions. Very Helpful.

  8. Rosa Ann Bryant,
    September 30, 2021 at 12:58 pm

    I have spent 5 hours trying to find a way to open this document, a 50 page play that I haven’t opened in 15 years. First I had to buy MS Word 365 because I am using Open Office, but I could n’t open the file. This really pissed me off because it felt like a Mafia shakedown , or a terrorist hostage taking, or kidnapping holding my child for ransom I can barely afford to pay! And I need the sleep so bad, but here it’s nearly 9am, and I haven’t gotten my document open. And I have finally found a songwriter Producer who might know just how to help me get my play produced! But the angel of a songwriter is leaving the country and lives out of state. But traveling during Covid is a perfect time to read a play from an unknown writer…but I might miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to put pages in his hand because this jerk’s captured my intellectual property without my asking and is “protecting” it for me… I do so hate this wretched game of keep away software MS is the only one still playing. Open Source and Block Chain are waiting in the wings to make MS Obsolete… and will leave room for someone to create a software to set free from MS Word Bondage, all our precious work, locked in another dimension of the world where everyone is meaner and inconsiderate.
    I am so frustrated. And I am highly strung and analog to the bone!

    God bless you good sir/madam at digitalwelt.org for this insight… I needed to say it.

  9. Fed up UK,
    September 10, 2021 at 9:39 am

    Cheers Ears
    Hated opening a word document and scrolling to the place to type and then having the yellow bar remind me I couldn’t edit, then have to disable and find the place again…
    Yes, it’s only a couple of clicks but they add up and suck your life away.

  10. Orcadian,
    June 7, 2021 at 3:46 pm

    I want to know how to turn off ‘protected view’ for a document I’ve already looked at and decided is safe. How do I do that please?

  11. didier,
    December 29, 2020 at 2:26 pm

    thank you
    this is so annoying

  12. Justin,
    December 15, 2020 at 1:24 am

    Thank you for calling out this idiocy.

  13. Andrew,
    October 22, 2020 at 2:30 am

    me too I hate Microsoft, you can’t measure it

  14. Lemmy Caution,
    October 12, 2020 at 5:22 am

    Thank you for this information. MICROSOFT: There should be an option for admins to delete this crap when installing Office 365.

    Thx

  15. MJ,
    October 6, 2020 at 2:13 pm

    Microsoft is a crap-o-la company, with their idiotic ideas, they should try to make things easier instead of harder.

  16. MC,
    September 21, 2020 at 8:03 pm

    Thank you!

  17. LEE,
    September 17, 2020 at 4:47 am

    You sir are a godsend, every damn file accessed through our vpn needed this

  18. Anonymous,
    August 27, 2020 at 7:25 pm

    The friggin program opens my excel spreadsheet in protected mode. When I go to the settings as shown in the instructions above, NONE OF THE FRIGGIN BOXES ARE EVEN CHECKED.

  19. andrew griffiths,
    August 18, 2020 at 11:52 am

    I hate it too. I used to like Word Perfect

  20. JLH,
    July 4, 2020 at 3:10 am

    So glad to see that more people agree that Microsoft is a literal cancerous virus on software and technology. what a f**king stupid feature. I can’t fathom the stupidity of a brain capable of deriving such a moronic feature in Microsoft products. This company has become a plague.

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