Uneditable Word Document

Question

I opened a Word document (.docx suffix) in Word on my Windows Phone 8. It worked fine to view the document.

But when I tried to edit the document, I got a message box that says:

Can't edit. Unsupported content. This version of Word doesn't support some of the content in this document. You won't be able to make any changes.

How can I find what that "unsupported content" is and get rid of it so that I can have a document that I can edit?

Answer 1

There are several reasons why a Word document cannot be edited on Mobile. However, following are the frequent reasons, I've tried to provide workarounds for some of them.

1. Track Changes option might be enabled on the document you are trying to edit. Open the document on PC and turn off this option to make it editable on your phone. See this on how to change this option.
2. Document contains frames. See this article on how to remove all frames from a Word document.
3. Document contains Custom markup (custom XML, Structured Document Tags (SDT), or smart tags). If you just open a document with Office 2013, custom mark-up is automatically removed.
4. Document contains XML tags with unsupported values. If you did not insert XML markup yourslef, solution for no.3 (above) should work for this as well.

Additional reasons for any Office document:

1. Saved as an older type of Microsoft Office document, such as a Microsoft Word 97-2003 document (.doc), Microsoft Excel 97-2003 workbook (.xls), or Microsoft PowerPoint 97-2003 presentation (.ppt).
2. Digitally signed.
3. Marked as final.
4. Protected using rights management.
5. Protected with a password.
6. Protected with restricted editing rights.

Try above solutions and check if it works!