Office documents, presentations or spreadsheets being downloaded from Internet are open to any form of Macro viruses that may harm the system. Microsoft Office has always been susceptible to a variety of security threats, ranging from macro viruses to exploits of embedded vulnerabilities. Generally frequent updates, patches, and third-party security products was what used by Users and administrators to keep their systems safe from these open threats embedded in office documents, presentations or spreadsheets.  Thus Microsoft has introduced a security measure “Protected View” in Office 2010.

Protected View, works by opening new documents from unknown sources or any file from Internet in a "digital sandbox" that prevents a user from editing the document or executing macros or other embedded features. Therefore a user can review the document without invoking any harmful or malicious attachment or code with the office document, the risk to the system is mitigated and the user may later decide whether they want to trust the document.

Protected View is one of the features in Office 2010 that has made the Office suite much secure. Since in a Protected View, file is a read only view, no changes can be made over the file . This feature was to only use in high risk scenarios where macros contains harmful scripts or malicious code. So if you want to disable read-only protected view in Office 2010, you can do the same.

1. Open a Word/ Excel file. (We would take an excel file in this scenario)

2. Launch Excel application. Navigate to "File" > "Options" in the menu.

3. In "Excel Options" dialog box, select "Trust Center" from the left pane. Then click "Trust Center Settings".

4. Select "Protected View" option from the left side pane in "Trust Center" dialog box.

5. From the "Protected View" option, there are several options which are all checked, Disable all of the checkboxes and then click "OK" to save changes.

This triggers off the read-only protected view in Office 2010. To enable this feature, just check these options.

The above procedure disables the Protected view for Excel 2010 only. To disable the Protected view for each and every Office 2010 applications , such as, Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and Outlook 2010 it need to be done individually for every application.