MS Office '13 does not save file as PDF...

The title says it all, Office '13 no longer saves file as PDF. When trying to do so, this is the error message that pops up:



It doesn't really matter, if it is existing/new document and/or the file is is local or on the network share. the end result is the same.

This used to work and it had been awhile that it does not. It's not really critical since MS Print to PDF and PhanthomPDF printer work just fine. I just miss the option of creating the PDF file directly in the MS Office applications.

TIA...

After further review, rather testing...

Removing the Foxit PDF Creator COM Add-in did not resolve this issue.

On the other hand, running "WINWORD.EXE" as an administrator did. It did not matter, if the the add-in was active/inactive, new/existing file, size of the file, or the PDF "Options" selected. MS Word saved the file as PDF and opened it in the default PDF reader. Since I don't normally use the admin account, the default PDF reader was the Edge browser that had been changed to Foxit PDF Reader.

Obviously, the admin has full control of the system, including to the "WINWORD.EXE" executable. Standard users on the other hand have "Read & Execute" and "Read" access, presumably that's the default.

Access to the MS Word short-cut in itself is "Full control" to everyone. The exception is the short-cut properties, that cannot be changed since they are grayed out:



Nor would it be advisable to change these setting, that would weaken the security protection for MS Word. Most certainly running the Office application as an admin is a bad idea.

Nonetheless, this issue is related to permission and/or the security settings for the MS Office Applications. Somewhere along the process of saving the file as PDF, the application saves or tries to save the PDF to a location that the standard user does not have access to, but the admin does.

Does anyone have an idea how to change security settings to resolve this issue, without compromising MS Office default security settings?

TIA...

ddelo said:

That is the same message, I was getting, when was using the UserCustomCulture. Once I changed it to a FrameworkCulture, the problem was solved!
Strange it didn't work for you...

And something else, I was also getting it when I was right clicking on any Word file in Windows explorer and selecting to create an Adobe pdf (I use Acrobat Pro 2017). Regardless if Word was open or not.

My system is and has always been set as "SpecificCultures":

Code:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultures([System.Globalization.CultureTypes]::AllCultures) | Where-Object {$_.Name -EQ $(Get-Culture)} | FL

Parent                         : enL
CID                             : 1033
KeyboardLayoutId      : 1033
Name                         : en-US
IetfLanguageTag        : en-US
DisplayName             : English (United States)
NativeName              : English (United States)
EnglishName             : English (United States)
TwoLetterISOLanguageName       : en
ThreeLetterISOLanguageName    : eng
ThreeLetterWindowsLanguageName : ENU
CompareInfo                    : CompareInfo - en-US
TextInfo                       : TextInfo - en-US
IsNeutralCulture               : False
CultureTypes                   : SpecificCultures, InstalledWin32Cultures, FrameworkCultures
NumberFormat                   : System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo
DateTimeFormat                 : System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo
Calendar                       : System.Globalization.GregorianCalendar
OptionalCalendars              : {System.Globalization.GregorianCalendar,ystem.Globalization.GregorianCalendar}
UseUserOverride                : True
IsReadOnly                     : False

PS: I would've love to upload the image for the same, but the Forum says, that I am not logged in...

I've added my account to the admin group as you suggested, but it does not resolve the issue. On the other hand, the original admin account works just fine. Created a new, standard user account and logged in to the system. With the new account, Office had no issue with saving the document as a PDF file.

Certainly, that points to some issues in my account, but this issue isn't just on my system. The other system with the same versions of software has the very same issue with saving Office documents as PDF within the applications. Original admin and new user account work, but the account that used daily does not.

This could be related to the age of the accounts, for example my account started out on W8.1, so it's been awhile. Or maybe it's the same person, who maintains these system causing it. At this point, it's hard to detect what causing this issue...





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ddelo said:

Since your user comes from a loooong way back, my best advice is to create a new Administrator user account, copy everything from your current profile to the new user and delete the old one (for deletion use Option 1 in this tutorial Delete User Account in Windows 10 | Tutorials).

For help in the copy process, you can take a look here: Copying Files From one User to Another In Windows 10 - Microsoft Community

Regardless of resolving the issue you have, this is not a bad idea overall.

No, it's not a bad idea Dimitri, but...

My own profile is 47 GBs, while the user on the other system has an 11 GBs profile. The SATA III and/or M.2 storage on these systems are fast, but may take awhile to copy the profiles over.

The main issue is that only data copied over, it does not include email accounts, bookmarks, desktop and other settings. Going through with resetting everything as currently exist might take some time and I'd rather reinstall everything in that case. Also, isn't Outlook 2013 the worse version for moving .pst files around?

As stated earlier, the Foxit PDF editor add-in for Office, print to PDF and convert to PDF via Explorer work just fine. It's doubtful, but maybe the size of the profile that causing this issue.