How to remove Protected View in Excel Windows 10

Have you wondered like 100 million other users what the heck this is?

It’s a grotesque and useless thing called “Protected View”. And until today, nobody knows why Microsoft has introduced this nonsense.

Basically, when you open documents, an ugly yellow dialog box pops up on the top of your Excel or Word document telling you to “Enable Editing” of your document, if you want to be able to edit it. Of course it makes absolutely no sense to ask such a question. Of course I want to edit it you morons. Why would I open it, then?

Anyways, now that is out of the way, let’s see how we can disable this crap.

Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to find it, so you have to go through a couple of steps:

Go to your menu “File”
Click “Options”
Click “Trust Center”
Click “Trust Center Settings…”
Click “Protected View”
Disable all check boxes

If you hate Microsoft as much as I do, please leave your insults below in the comment section.

Thank you.

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Excel opens most files from other sources in Protected View mode by default. In this guide, we're going to show you how to disable protected view mode in Excel.

Excel, like most other Office applications such as Word and PowerPoint, shows this message to ensure that you are not opening a potentially dangerous file.

We are going to be taking a looking at two different ways of disabling protected view mode. The first one is a folder-based solution which allows you to define trusted folders. Excel assumes you are aware of the files in those folders and will not show any warnings. The second approach is to turn off the Protect View completely.

Trusted Folders

You can set any number of folders as trusted folders which will be a safe zone for Excel files. If a document in one of the trusted folders, Excel will not ask for confirmation when opening it. Trusted folder approach can be especially useful if you and your colleagues keep your files in certain folders. To set a folder as trusted follow the steps below.

Open Excel Options from the File menu
Select Trust Center
Click the Trust Center Settings button
Activate the Trusted Location section
Click the Add New Location button to open the Microsoft Office Trusted Location dialog
Click the Browse button to select the folder you want to add
Press OK to finish the process

Disabling protected view mode completely

If you are completely sure about files you open, you can choose to disable protected view mode entirely. Like in the previous method, open the Trusted Center dialog by following the first three steps above, and then follow the steps below.