This is a complaint on several forums and I have read where some people posted that they can in fact open a password protected MS Office file directly on their iPhone running 14.2.x without having MS Office installed but I firmly believe they were mistaken in that they did not understand how a file actually opens on their phone/tablet or they wrote in haste before having a chance to really test it.
Some have subsequently posted that all of a sudden it stopped working and they did nothing to their iPhone or iPad…this is hard to understand but that is what they wrote. Some claimed Apple fixed it but said their iOS had not changed from when it did not work to when they said it did. Some people just don't put many details in their posts so you really have to guess at what they are saying and english may not be the mother tongue of others who post. When you hit upon a topic of interest in one of these support forums, you really have to read all the posts in it, not just the one marked Solved because many times that is not the real solution.
As of this writing, Apple has not released a fix that puts this feature back into iOS. However, there are still a couple ways of opening password protected MS Office files under iOS 14.2.X, none of them are as simple as they used to be before Apple released 14.2 so it entails an extra step now, it is what it is till they fix it, if in fact they see it as an issue in the first place, who knows, maybe it was intentional :-0
Yes, in looking at it from a different angle, we are talking about opening password protected Microsoft files on an Apple product where Apple software was doing all the work. Could it be Apple found out this was possible and decided to plug the hole and make people download MS Office onto their device to be able to do it? Or could it be Microsoft discovered it was possible to open a password protected Microsoft file on an Apple device without first downloading or buying the Microsoft app and they complained to Apple? Well, at this point its anyones guess.
So once again, here is how it can be done.. ..
1- I installed the 'free' MS Office app (not 360), from the Apple App store and that takes care of Word, PowerPoint and Excel but I do not manually open that MS Office app when I need to open an MS password protected file. For me, I have my files (Excel, Word, etc) stored in Apple's "File" folder app which comes standard in iOS, all the files are there in one nice tidy place. I open the file I want from within the Files app and let the phone do the rest. I have not tried opening a file from within my Dropbox app as I just simply haven't used that app in a long time and I do not have the business edition of Dropbox but by explaining how I do it, I think those who do use Dropbox on their phones/tablets will find a work around as well.
When I touch the file I want to open, it looks at the file extension then looks at the apps on my phone, it finds the MS Office app and automatically opens that app and then that app opens my Excel file thereby prompting me for the password. Works great and since its opening it in the proper app instead of an Apple Preview, I get to use the app features if I want and I found it easier to zoom in and copy and paste in the actual app vs Preview. I'm actually starting to like it better than the way it was but would still like to see Apple put things back to the way they were because for me, a Preview of the file was good enough for my purposes.
2- Others just open their MS Office app first or if they don't have that app but only have the separate Excel or Word or Powerpoint app, they open that first, navigate to the file they want and open it by entering their password just like you would on a desktop.
In other words, you now need to have the app responsible for the file extension you want to open, on your device whereas before, Apple's embedded Preview opened it automatically. What was nice about using Preview was that you could "preview' the file directly from within Apple Mail and of course now you cannot. However, today’s devices are fast and it only takes two seconds for my iPhone to read the file extension, open the MS Office app and present me with the space to enter the password.
Here is one more workaround...that works! Take your password protected MS file and save it as a password protected pdf on your computer and email it to yourself and you will find that you can open it directly from within Apple Mail on an iOS 14.2.x device. This works for those who do not need to save the file but just need to open it to get the data within it and then will delete the email. Of course you can also keep it in your Files app if you want.
Hope this helps.. ..
