Documents Marked as Security Risk

Lorrie has Microsoft 365 and just changed to Windows 11. After this change to Windows 11, all her Word documents have a "security risk" flag on them. This is blocking her from using all of her macros, which causes huge problems for her. She wonders how she can I, once again, use her documents like normal.

Without seeing the actual message being displayed, it is difficult to provide a single, specific suggestion for fixing the problem. There are some clues provided, however, and that may be good enough to posit some suggestions.

First, Lorrie indicates that the problem only came up after upgrading to Windows 11. This would seem to suggest that the problem is with Windows itself. If your files are downloaded from the Internet, or if they were temporarily stored on the Internet and then downloaded after you upgraded to Windows 11, then Windows could think they are malicious in nature and will block them.

In this case, the specific terminology of the file being "blocked" will be utilized by Windows. The following site provides a good, in-depth tutorial of why this occurs and how you can unblock both individual documents and entire folders of documents:

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/unblock-file-downloaded-from-internet-in-windows-11.1125/

Of course, it is possible that in upgrading to Windows 11 all of your documents had their properties changed in some way that prevents their opening correctly. The easiest way to check this is to, within Windows, locate the file, right-click it, and choose Properties from the resulting Context menu. This displays the Properties dialog box for the file and the General tab should be displayed by default.

If, at the bottom of the dialog box, you see a checkbox for "Unblock," then you should go back to the tutorial I just mentioned above. If you don't, however, see such a checkbox, then you should first make sure that the Read-only checkbox is cleared. Then, click on the Security tab and make sure that the proper users—including yourself—have access to the file.

You should note that you may only be able to change who can access the document if Windows believes you to be the file's owner. If (for some reason) you are not noted as the file owner, then you need to be using Windows with an account that has Administrator privileges. If the documents are stored on a shared network drive, then the access settings will only be able to be changed by someone who as network administrator privileges.

There is another real possibility that you must be aware of—the behavior you are seeing may not be related to the Windows update at all, but to a Microsoft 365 update that occurred at the same time as your Windows update. If this is the case, then there is a very good chance that you won't have a problem opening your documents, but when you do open them, you'll see a notice that the macros in the document have been disabled. You are informed of this through a banner at the top of the document (right under the ribbon area) that says "SECURITY RISK."

If this describes what you are seeing, it is due to a change in the Trust Center defaults that was recently made by Microsoft. This change (and what you can do about it) is described in this article:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/security/internet-macros-blocked

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13905) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.