When I open to edit a document created by LibreOffice Writer two years ago, I can’t remove the “read-only” and can’t edit it. It is the same situation when I open it in MS Word, and it is being edited by someone else.
I duplicated the file and opened it, but it was still “read-only”. I looked at the properties of this file, but the attributes of the file itself are not read-only.
How can I remove this “read-only” setting?
Windows10, LibreOffice 7.1.6
Hi. This is an operating system/anti-virus issue mostly.
There might be more than one read-only issue here; access blocked to LibreOffice, the file wasn’t closed properly the previous time (underlying the blocked access as MS Office says it is read only), your Windows user profile might have been damaged during a Windows update. Try the below potential solution first.
You probably need to allow soffice.bin access to Controlled folders. See the slightly oddly titled question and my reply: Installed 7.1 yesterday; today MS Office is non-op
If Microsoft Office says it is read-only there might be an old lock file in the folder. Open File Explorer and click View > Options > Change folder and search options, in the dialog tick the radio button to show hidden folders and files
.~Lock.[YourFilename.odt]#, where [YourFilename.odt] is the name of your file. If the lockfile has an old date then delete it. MS Office should then be able to open and edit it, and if you have unblocked LibreOffice then it too will be able to open and edit it.
If you have any questions just ask. Cheers, Al
HI just went through loads of help articles and the wiki. This seems the more recent moment when this question was asked. There seems to be lots of levels of edit only that are either created by libreoffice or appear because of file transfer from a docx.
In may case normally it worked to just do a save as ODT and saving as a different file name. But for this one particular file I could not edit it. even though edit mode was on.
I then noticed a little button on the bottom right. that said read only: Section 1 this seems to be a way to protect sections of the document. I clicked on it. and a menu appeared and I deleted the section in my case and I could edit the document.
The following images are in spanish but the buttons are in the same place. Look for “remove” or something similar instead of “quitar”.
If you manage it please add a screen shot in english for the next person!
There probably is another way of brining up the “modify section” window.
Version: 24.2.6.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 420(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.8; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: es-ES (es_ES.UTF-8); UI: es-ES
Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
Calc: threaded
