Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Office 2003 documents Open in Read-Only Mode

If you click on an Office document in SharePoint to open it - it loads it in the relevant application, but in Read-Only mode. The way to open a document to edit - is to access the context menu and select "Edit in Microsoft Office Word. This is especially annoying when searching for documents, since the search results does not show the context menu and does not provide a link to the document library containing the document. So the only option is to load the document in Read Only mode but then to save it - the user needs to know which document library it belongs to and then manually navigate to it.
There is however a workaround as detailed in http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=870853. It involves adding a new registry key on every desktop as follows:
1. Quit all Office 2003 programs that are running.
2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
3. Locate and then right-click the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Internet
4. Point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type OpenDocumentsReadWriteWhileBrowsing, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click OpenDocumentsReadWriteWhileBrowsing, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
8. On the File menu, click Exit to quit Registry Editor.

If you like, you can paste the following into a command box:
reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Internet /vOpenDocumentsReadWriteWhileBrowsing /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

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