Outlook no longer opens Office documents

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Recently Outlook on my wife’s computer has stopped being able to open Word and Excel attachments. When we click on an attachment the program splash screen will come up but it never completes to open the file. If I save these attachments to the hard drive I can open them normally. I recently upgraded her computer to Windows 10, but am not sure if the problem is coincident with that. She is running Office 2010.

Thanks in advance.

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Try repairing the Office installation.

Joe

--Joe

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I did the repair operation on Office, but no change in symptoms.
John

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Try emptying the Office temporary cache folder. Note: it is a sub-folder under IE cache – C:UsersUser-NameAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsINetCache

BTW, you must change the view settings to not hide operating system files.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks. I emptied all the files in the folder but problem remains.
John

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Could be a Windows 10 problem. Have you run SFC /SCANNOW from an elevated command prompt?

Joe

--Joe

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When trying to open a Word attachment, does Winword,exe start and crash, start and continue running, or not start at all?, You can check this in Task Manager, or in Process Explorer. If it’s crashing, there may be an error message in Event Viewer which would give you a clue to what’s happening.

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I also first would have said to run the SFC command and remember if Windows 8.1 or 10 to run it in ADMIN mode as well. But that could detect an error in that area. Next, in OUTLOOK go up to the menu bar and then TOOLS and in that menu select the “Trust Center”. Then, select the item “Attachment Handling” on the left. With that done, then on the right, you should see the button “Attachment And Document Previewers”
Open that up and verify that it in fact, has Win-word, or Word, Excel etc. listed. If not, that very well could be your issue. Why, is a totally different issue and WAY ABOVE my pay-grade LOL

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Check out the Microsoft Office Configuration Tool (OffCAT). When I upgraded to Office 2016 and ran the tool, it found half a dozen registry errors and told me what the proper registry entries should be. I used regedit to make the changes and then ran the tool again to confirm that the errors were gone. Then viewing items directly in Outlook ran fine.

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