How to Disable Protected View in Office 2016

If you are working with Office Documents on a daily basis, you will come across this “Security Feature” called protected view. It has been around since Office 2007 days and is still an integrated feature on Office 2016 and is enabled by default. This feature can be annoying to a lot of users who typically work in a corporate environment and is isolated from the internet. The good news is that this feature can be disabled. If you want to know how to disable protected view in office 2016, you are in the right place.

Click>File>Options>Trust Center >Protected View>Uncheck Items

Adding a Trusted Location

If you do not want to completely disable the “Protected View” from the settings menu, you can alternatively add “Trusted Locations” in your internal company network. See the screenshot below:

When you add a “Trusted Location” all the files from those locations are automatically marked as safe. For Office 2016, the registry entries are changed, so you will not be able to disable protected view from the Windows Registry. For earlier versions you can change the following settings:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Word\Security\ProtectedView
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Excel\Security\ProtectedView
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\PowerPoint\Security\ProtectedView
and disable DisableAttachementsInPV,DisableInternetFilesInPV & DisableUnsafeLocationsInPV

Please note that this feature is there for your computer safety. If you disable these options and you try to open an attachment downloaded from the internet, it can potentially harm your computer environment.

Hope this helps!