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When I click the “?” in the title bar of my Office 365 apps (e.g. Word, Excel), the following information displays: “This command isn’t available. Your organization’s administrator turned off the service required to use this feature.” (Screenshot attached.) Search as I may, I haven’t been able to discover whatever Group Policy or registry change I made (I’m the administrator as well as the regular user of this home laptop), in the past, to prevent Help from appearing. Any ideas?
Try this?
Your Connected Experiences have probably been turned off for all Office programs. To fix this:
1. Open Excel (or any Office program).
2. Click on Account near the bottom of the page.
3. Under Account Privacy, click on Manage Settings.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the window that opens and click on Turn on all connected experiences.
5. Click on OK.
You’ll have to restart all open Office programs to make the changes take effect.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Stab in the dark….
I don’t have Office of any edition installed on my computers. I don’t know if the following affects Office365 as well as the OS (except as having a similar name). I was looking for something outside GP and the Registry.
Most of my Win10/11 installations were originally upgrades from Win7 at some point. Back when in Win7, we were chasing DiagTrack and one of the blocks was to disable the associated Service: Connected User Experience and Telemetry. It is still disabled in my current installations.
Rats, that service does seem to be running:
So, I uninstalled Office 365, did a restart, and downloaded/installed it again. I’m still getting that message about the administrator having turned off the service required to access the help feature.
Here are the details of my Windows version:
OK, another stab in the dark, separate from the one PK took.
I’m on Windows 10, but this item might also be in Windows 11 as well, either in the same location or a slightly different location, because it’s in Group Policy.
In Computer Configuration>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Online Assistance, there’s a single policy setting that’s labeled “Turn off Active Help”. On my machine, it’s set to what I think is its default setting of “Not configured”. But, per the description of the setting’s purpose, if it’s set to “Enabled” that possibly could cause the symptom you’re experiencing, where Office 365 thinks the service it needs is disabled. In other words, enabling that policy might just disable the service that O365 needs in order to offer you help.
Check this out. I know you did the Connected Experience setting that Susan mentioned, but there is another setting that also has to be checked concerning downloaded content.
It turns out you’re right, PKCano: all three of those settings have to be turned on/checked. Help is now working in Office 356 apps.
Interestingly, the Privacy settings are in three places: Account, Options\General (in Word or Excel) and also in the Trust Centre. I suspect they’re linking to the same place. Also, in the online Microsoft “Manage account” centre (link from the computer’s Settings for a Microsoft Account), these settings are also present.
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