You are attempting to open a file that is blocked by...

[senormic]

Hi All,

I had an email with a Excel Spreadsheet attachment that wouldn't open and gave this warning:

"You are attempting to open a file that is blocked by your registry policy setting" This appears to be a problem with opening legacy files

Based on the solution articles below, I downloaded the .reg files for Office but I need to know how to create a policy that will use them? I have 4 of them that I need to deploy. Can anyone help me to resolve this issue via a GPO?


Cause:

Office 2003 SP3 has some policy settings in the Group Policy Administrative Template (Excel1.adm) that prevent opening Office Excel documents that have binary file types such as *.xls, *.xla, *.xlt, *.xlm, *.xlw, *.xlb, or *.xlc. Word (word11.adm) and Powerpoint (ppt.adm) have similar settings.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ork2003/HA102380191033.aspx


Solution:

To modify this policy to remove this block, the attached registry files need to be installed on all machines that have Office 2003 SP3. See referenced KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941636/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/

[AdamV]

You don't need t ouse the .reg files as far as I can see, they are for people without GP (eg non-AD environment).

You need to create a policy, add the relevant Office 11 .adm files to it, then change the settings you need.

However, given that you have this restriction in place and it is not a default, have you checked that none of your existing GPOs have these settings in them?

[senormic]

Thanks for the info, do you know which GPO I should look at to allow these files? I don't have any GPO's blocking this, I read it was when you installed Office SP3.

Thanks,

Chris

[AdamV]

SP3 blocked a bunch of file types, but I am pretty sure that "XLS" was not one of them, otherwise it would make Excel fairly useless for most people.
I have Office 2003 sp3 installed on a machine without any trouble.

Try a gpresult /v to see what policies and settings you do have in force on the machine - maybe it's a local thing rather than domain based.

[senormic]

Ok thanks. Well I can't really find a policy for this so I don't know which one to add. I resolved this by opening up my files on an Office SP2 machine and re-saving them. If anyone knows exactly which policy to add it would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris