How do I fix a 'Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges' error?

Sorry to hear that elliebelly - have you tried re-installing the software installed on the affected computer? Maybe that will do the trick!

If that doesn't help, please let me know if I can reach out to your Dropbox associated email address to work on this together.

Thanks in advance!

I too am having this problem, I spoke to Microsoft and they reinstalled Office 365 but it didn't solve issue. As with the other people posting here this only started relatively recently. Issue resolves with a restart but as another user points out - that's a painful solution. I am looking at moving away from dropbox despite being a customer for over 8 years.

I'm having the same problem, also! Will try the things you mentioned.  It mostly happens when I create the document on my office computer and then try to access it on my laptop.  The error message says:

Word cannot open the document:  user does not have access privileges

Hi there Joyrose28,

Yes, please let us know if the issue is resolved for you after giving the steps mentioned in this thread a try. 

If you're still experiencing the same behavior though, could you please send us a screenshot (without any personal info) of the error message, as well as what you see when you hover over your Dropbox icon that's next to your computer's clock?

Thanks in advance!

I am also having this problem. Word files created on several Windows machines cannot be opened on my 2017 MacBook Pro. As of September 5, 2019 all of my OSs and Office programs were up to date. MacOS is version 10.14.6 (18G95), Dropbox version is v79.4.143. Office was downloaded from scratch a few days ago. On startup, Dropbox seems to be using around 2GB of ram and 40% of the CPU continuously even though it had been completely synced the last time the computer started. From what I can tell, Dropbox's sync algorithm is the problem. I added one small folder to selective sync and then Dropbox started "syncing" the entire Dropbox directory... Does Drpobox not have some sort of version control type sync? Does it really have to index the entire filestructure each time a selective sync is adjusted? If that's the case, Dropbox is not for me anymore. 

Hello palmerpark, 

I'd be more than happy to help look into this with you. 

If your computer is experiencing high CPU when the desktop app is running, could you check out this article which lists some suggestions on how to tackle it? Maybe one of them will do the trick. 

Let me know how it goes!

So this is still unresolved without a solution from Dropbox other than to blame Microsoft?

I had the same porblem with Word and it went away when I delete dropbox.

Hi Jeff D.22 and Anson010, thanks for reaching out to us about this!

As a first step, could you please clarify the following for us:

• Does this occur to all Word documents in your Dropbox folder? 
• Is the desktop app up to date or is it still trying to sync content? You can see that by hovering over your Dropbox icon on your system tray or menu bar. 

Any additional info and screenshots (without personal details) would be very helpful.

Keep us posted!

That link describes part of my problem; I have well over 300,000 files. That does not seem to be a problem on my main PC, but it simply won't sync onto a new MacBook Pro. I left the laptop to sync (as the only running program) for 4 days on a 300 megabit wifi connection and after 4 days of running dropbox at nearly full CPU load, it hadn't synced any files at all and won't let me open any of the files that were locally saved into the Dropbox folder. I've tried reinstalling Dropbox and selectively syncing a subset of the files that I need and still get the same outcome. If there is an upper limit to the maximum number of files that I can store in Dropbox (other than the vague "around 300,000" mentioned in that link) I'd like to know that. 

Thanks for getting back to us, palmerpark!

The number given of 300,000 files is a soft limit which heavily depends on the specifications of each computer. This could explain why you're having a different experience from one device to another. 

From there, since you've already selectively synced content to improve the syncing process of the desktop app, I'd recommend giving it some more time to complete. 

In any case, keep us posted on the progress and don't hesitate to nudge us again if you have any other questions. Cheers!