Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Something has happened to my copy of Open Office. It won't let me edit my documents. It always opens them in a "Read Only" format, and when i go to edit them it asks, "This document cannot be edited, possibly due to missing accsess rights. Do you want to edit a copy of the document?"

Can anyone tell me how to fix this please? I've tried uninstalling it and reinstalling it and updating and nothing seems to work.

* Are you sure that the Open as read only checkbox in the Open file dialog box is not checked?
* Reset your user profile.

For the moment I can't think of much else.

Nope. Sorry, it just won't work. Thanks for trying.

It's worth noting that all the documents are on my external hard drive and i could open them in edit format before. Now, it just won't no matter what.

Maybe a permissions issue in Win 7?

By the ludicrously large trophy room of Manchester United! I got it working!

I fixed the problem by remembering something my brother told me about Win 7. You sometimes have to TRICK it into thinking it's Vista. Instead of normaly opening Open Office, I right clicked the icon and selected the option "Run as Administrator." THEN i could open my documents in edit mode.

Thankyou for your time and help, Floris V. Your comment about Win 7 helped me fix the probelm.

Did you check the permissions on the external drive? You shouldn't normally run OOo "as administrator" in Vista or Windows 7. See this similar problem:

[Solved] OOo3.2.0 Can't edit existing MS Office 2000 files.

Exactly; you should sort permissions problems instead of overriding them with admin's permissions.

If your problem has been solved, please edit the first post in this thread and add [Solved] to the title bar.