Excel 2010 error This rights protected document cannot be opened because the Rights management feature has been disabled on your machine by Policy

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Error opening Password protected Excel sheet "This rights protected document cannot be opened because the Rights management feature has been disabled on your machine by Policy"

  1. Opening Excel 2010 SP1 sheet from Outlook you enter password and receive the following error "This rights protected document cannot be opened because the Rights management feature has been disabled on your machine by Policy"
  2. You can open with 'open and repair' from within Excel but repair confirms following in log. 

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log:

This is optional. Put things like specific environments or diagnostic steps here. Delete if necessaryDiagnosis

Cause

IME Language (in our case Japanese IME as default). Took some days to identify IME as an unlikely root cause. This is a known bug to Microsoft since summer 2011 but no fix as yet. 

Workaround

You can open the excel sheet from 'Open and Repair' option within Excel. 

Resolution

  • Remove all IME keyboards the account users logon.
  • Logged in a local admin check IME is not default under regional and language options, administrative tab, copy settings option (Windows 7).
  • Backup & then delete the 'problem' c:\user\[usrname] account and restart.
  • Logon and confirm you can open the problem password protected excel sheet
SELECT * FROM SPACES;

(info) info is good

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Unknown macro: {kbsurvey}
Last modified on May 20, 2016

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