There was a problem sending the command to the program

Following the lead of another poster, I did the following:

For Word/OneNote -- right click on an unopened Word document (.docx), select Open With and change the default program to Microsoft Word. The setting was set for Microsoft Word Viewer.

For an Excel document, I did the same but, after right clicking and choosing 'open with', I had to actually go into 'browse' and search for the Excel.exe as it didn't show up in their lists - even though about 10 other options did (very weird).

Super easy and now everything seems to be working fine! So relieved!

Thank you, DSammy! This fixed the issue for me, while the Microsoft FixIt solution did not.