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Word won't open older files under Catalina

I have Word for Mac 16.16.16. It opened Word files that date back to the 90's (A while ago I updated a bunch of them to be sure) but after Catalina it won't open many older ones. Not just .doc files either, some .docx too.

Posted on Nov 22, 2019 12:22 PM

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Posted on Nov 22, 2019 2:43 PM

Thanks everyone. After a few hours of panic, it looks like everything is okay. In safe mode I couldn't even find the files I was worried about, but when I went back to normal mode they all opened just fine. I don't know what happened but things look good right now.

12 replies

Nov 22, 2019 1:36 PM in response to Robin Reed1

Sometimes a major system upgrade messes with file permissions in the Home folder. Check the permissions on those files that won't open to make sure that's not what happened.


Also boot into Safe Mode (Use Safe Mode to isolate issues with your Mac) and try opening Word and then the files from there. Reboot normally and try again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 10 minutes as it's doing some system cache cleaning, volume verifying and directory repairing. 



Word won't open older files under Catalina

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