Turning off, or scaling back, Office 2010’s “Protected Mode”

Addictive Tips - Disable Protected View In Office 2010

“By default Office 2010 will open documents in protected mode that fail validation, have been downloaded from the internet, are located in potentially unsafe location and include attachments. Protected view opens the document in read-only mode thus minimizing the exposure to some potential security threat.

If you are an experienced user who is annoyed by the protected view, you can always disable it even though it is not recommended by Microsoft.

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While I applaud Microsoft’s drive toward continuing to security in Office 2010, I can see some cases where I’m going to want to scale back the Protected Mode behavior. While it’s not hard to do in a document by document case (which I really like being able to do so easily) there’s some business cases where I’m going to have to turn this off (i.e. in some automation cases, etc).

So now that I know where to turn it off in the UI, I’m going to have to hunt down where those setting are really saved (which I’m 99% sure is the registry)…