Recently, I received a report from one of my users says that when her open any Excel workbook it will prompt “Office has detected a problem with this file. To help protect your computer this file cannot be opened.”. No matter what she does this error message will prompt anyway. In this post I’ll demonstrate how to troubleshoot and resolve this kind of issue.
The troubleshooting process
When facing with this kind of issue, you first need to verify whether this issue will occurred in the Safe mode. To do that closing all of opened Office365 programs, then press “Windows logo key + R” to open up Run > then enter “excel /safe” > press enter key.
If opened Excel in Safe Mode without this issue, then certainly that this issue related to some third-party Excel add-in. Which this is your next move.
So, at this moment remains Excel in Safe Mode then heading to > File > Options > Add-ins > review add-in under “Inactive Application Add-ins”. When you spot the suspicious add-in, close Excel program and re-launch under normal mode. Of course, you’ll saw the error message again > click OK to ignore > then select File > Options > Add-ins > review add-ins under “Active Application Add-ins”. You should found the root cause – in my case is “Accessdatabaseengine_x64”.
The final action, of course, to remove it and/or disable it. By doing so go to Files > Options > Add-ins > select “Go” under “Excel Add-ins” option > then uncheck box the suspicious add-in – in my case “Accessdatabaseengine_x64”.
Then re-launch Excel program under normal mode, no above message displayed! Problem resolved!
Conclusion
Whenever you encountered such issue, always launch Excel via Safe Mode to verify whether it is caused by add-in. If that so, focus your problem to find the suspicious add-in. However, for some cases you may need to repeat above mentioned actions several times in order to successfully disable or remove the suspicious add-in.
