I have Windows ME and Microsoft word. I have all my word documents from school arranged in folders based on each semester. Today, I opened up a 12 page paper for editing and I cannot do a single thing to this document. Each time I try, I get the following message "The command is not available because the document is locked for edit". It appears that every document that I have written in word for the past seven semesters is "locked for edit". Any ideas?? I am desperate to edit and submit this 12 page paper. Please help!

From another discussion group:

"If this only happens in one particular document, try clicking on Tools |
Unprotect Document. If all new and existing documents are locked for
editing, then it's probably because you have not activated your
Word/Office software, or because you have an expired trial version of
Office 2003. What happens if you start Word and click on Help |
Activate Product? If you are already activated, a dialog box saying so
will appear. If you are not activated, the Activation Wizard will
start. If you have an expired trial version, a dialog box will prompt
you to enter a valid product key or purchase a key online."

Also, if you have WordPerfect available, try opening the document with that.

As a side note, I would HIGHLY recommend you choose to at least back up your documents in a format other than Microsoft's .doc, such as RTF or OpenDocument. This way you will be sure you will be able to open the document without having to depend on Microsoft to support the format, which they keep changing.

The same kind of thing happened to me with WordPerfect documents... I had to hunt down an old copy of WordPerfect to open the files so I could read them, as there were no other WPD reader that would work with the files properly. If I had saved them as RTF, that sort of thing would never have happened.

These documents are your work and your history... say no to vendor lock-in.

;)
psi42

This is a somewhate late response, but for future searchers who hit this:

I had a document that was locked and password-protected. I didn't know the password, but some of my commands were still available. So I just copy-pasted the entire document into a new document, and that did the trick for me.

Good luck!

-P