All excel files opening in read only mode in Windows 7

Initially I was only able to open Office documents in Read Only using Windows 7 Professional. Particularly annoying was that I could not even edit Access databases. With a bit of experimentation I discovered the following.

In Windows 7 Professional all drives and sub-folders except folders specific to your user account are initially protected in Read Only mode. Changing the file attributes does not work. This also applies Administrator users.

To correct this,
- log on in an account that has administrator privileges,
- in explorer right click the folder or drive you want to enable full access to,
- select Properties, select the Security tab, click the Edit button in that tab,
- highlight the user you wish to grant privileges,
- tick the desired boxes (Full Control grants full access),
- then click OK as necessary to apply the changes.

Hi,

Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete -> click task manager) -> processes tab -> click Excel.exe -> end process. Worked for me.

Thanks. God Bless.

Aaron

I just experienced this exact problem: Using Windows 7, all Excel files open in read-only mode when opened from the file system, but not when opened using File / Open from within Excel.

This happens for all Excel files, whether downloaded from the internet, opened from an email, or created locally; whether created by another user or created by me; whether saved into a restricted folder or an unrestricted folder; and whether or not saved with "Read-only recommended".

I believe all of the answers given so far, while helpful, address similar problems, but not this exact problem.

After long research, I discovered that the problem was an addin whose .xll file had been moved. When I told Excel to stop trying to load that addin, the problem went away.

My guess is that there is a bug in Excel, which causes it to go into read-only mode if it can't load an addin at launch. Given that this problem was first reported here in 2011, and I'm still experiencing it in 2018, this is apparently a long-standing bug that spans several versions of Excel.