If you’re having trouble with opening from or saving to SharePoint from Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2010 it might be that the Protected View settings are interfering in the process. You might see this when you’re running a SharePoint and Office on the same machine, like in a demo or development environment.
- Creating a new document from SharePoint: “Word has encountered a problem.”
- Opening a document from SharePoint: “Word experienced an error trying to open the file.”
- Saving a document to SharePoint: Dialog will not open on the Document Library, but rather your local Documents folder
A quick fix is to disable the Protected View for “potentially unsafe locations”:
Important: This is a per-application setting so do this for Word, Excel and PowerPoint individually !