I am running into an issue with a user whose Word document is somehow turning itself into Read-Only. The user is using Word 2003 and is accessing a document that is in a Server 2008 share. The document itself starts out as a normal, editable document (user has Full Control permissions), and the user is able to save and do the 'normal' things you would do to a document. However, after a couple of saves, the document turns to Read-Only (according to the title bar) even though the Read-Only attribute is not checked on the document's properties.
Here is some additional information about the situation:
*User has approximately 5-8 Word documents open at a time
*User saves the document frequently (sometimes at a frequency of once per minute)
*Once the document is closed it will open as a normal document if reopened
*When the document does turn to Read-Only the user will do a "Save As" on the document and save it as FILENAME # where # is some increment of how many times this has happened (some documents are up to their 30th iteration)
I understand that there is probably some room for user education here and that they could just be copying the RO document to a new one, closing and opening the RO doc, then copying all the information back. However, I would like to get to the route cause of the problem and try to stop it from happening in the first place.
UPDATE: Apparently the reinstall did not fix the issue. I researched the issue a bit more and found that disabling the background save may take care of it, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet. Does anyone else have any other ideas?
Best Answer
In the interest of helping you resolve your problem here's a resolution I found at WordTips:
Have you considered implementing a real-time office document sharing plugin like DocVerse? Note: As this product is currently in beta it only supports PowerPoint but will support all Office docs in the future. I used it as an example for implementing a more integrated way of sharing docs across a network.
Also, this Read-Only hassle could be related to a network permissions issue as opposed to a document permissions issue since it involves files on the share. I'm assuming the user doesn't experience this issue when they save and edit files locally.