Microsoft Office - "Trusted Location" Problem - A Fix
Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 5:28 am
Hello Everyone.
Posting this in case it proves to be useful for anyone else grappling with the "Trust Center" feature of recent Microsoft Office Products.
I have been working with Microsoft Office 2016 Professional, running on Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit desktops [2 copies of Office on 2 different machines] and hitting a problem any time I opened a file that contained a macro. I say "problem", what I mwan to say is that I see a little amber/yellow warning strip pop up, with a message of,
"The path you have entered cannot be used as a Trusted Location for security reasons. Choose another location or a specific folder."
I'd asked Microsoft Support for help and after a bunch of checks and tests, they declared that the problem had to be with my QNAP NAS [a TS670] because they "don't see the problem on NAS boxes from other vendors". Turns out they might have been wrong... The issue I had all boiled down to the full CIFS path name that I was trying to add to my Microsoft Office "Trusted Locations" shortlist.
I had configured my Windows Workstations to automatically map 2 different "data" volumes, one to each of my 2 QNAP NAS boxes . Once this has been "done once" [and assuming you let Windows remember the access credentials], then in Windows Explorer you will see such a network drive mapped as
Public (\\192.168.1.41) Q:
If you go to Microsoft Office Trust Centre, tick the box that allows trusting network locations [which is reported as not recommended], you might then be tempted to enter values such as:-
T:\Data\Office Files\
or
\\TS670\Data\Office Files\
because this is exactly how these locations appear in i.e. Microsoft Windows Explorer.
This is, in fact, wrong.
Instead, a better way to do this is to go in to Trust Center, activate the network locations option, select "Browse" and then navigate to the location - select your QNAP NAS and double-click on it, then select your preferred share. As a result, what you should see in your "User Locations" field in the Trust Center is something which looks like this,
\\TS670\Public\Data\
and not this
\\TS670\Data\
even though the second of these formats is exactly what Windows Explorer shows you.
Obviously I can't know without looking at the code, but at a wild guess I'll suggest that the programmer[s] who wrote the Windows Explorer network drive mapping code and the programmer[s] who wrote the Trust Center for Office didn't actually speak to eachother. This problem would have been entirely avoidable had these two pieces of Microsoft software actually represented network pathnames in a consistent way.
I do hope that this proves to be helpful to anyone else grappling with this particular problem.
Posting this in case it proves to be useful for anyone else grappling with the "Trust Center" feature of recent Microsoft Office Products.
I have been working with Microsoft Office 2016 Professional, running on Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit desktops [2 copies of Office on 2 different machines] and hitting a problem any time I opened a file that contained a macro. I say "problem", what I mwan to say is that I see a little amber/yellow warning strip pop up, with a message of,
"The path you have entered cannot be used as a Trusted Location for security reasons. Choose another location or a specific folder."
I'd asked Microsoft Support for help and after a bunch of checks and tests, they declared that the problem had to be with my QNAP NAS [a TS670] because they "don't see the problem on NAS boxes from other vendors". Turns out they might have been wrong... The issue I had all boiled down to the full CIFS path name that I was trying to add to my Microsoft Office "Trusted Locations" shortlist.
I had configured my Windows Workstations to automatically map 2 different "data" volumes, one to each of my 2 QNAP NAS boxes . Once this has been "done once" [and assuming you let Windows remember the access credentials], then in Windows Explorer you will see such a network drive mapped as
Public (\\192.168.1.41) Q:
If you go to Microsoft Office Trust Centre, tick the box that allows trusting network locations [which is reported as not recommended], you might then be tempted to enter values such as:-
T:\Data\Office Files\
or
\\TS670\Data\Office Files\
because this is exactly how these locations appear in i.e. Microsoft Windows Explorer.
This is, in fact, wrong.
Instead, a better way to do this is to go in to Trust Center, activate the network locations option, select "Browse" and then navigate to the location - select your QNAP NAS and double-click on it, then select your preferred share. As a result, what you should see in your "User Locations" field in the Trust Center is something which looks like this,
\\TS670\Public\Data\
and not this
\\TS670\Data\
even though the second of these formats is exactly what Windows Explorer shows you.
Obviously I can't know without looking at the code, but at a wild guess I'll suggest that the programmer[s] who wrote the Windows Explorer network drive mapping code and the programmer[s] who wrote the Trust Center for Office didn't actually speak to eachother. This problem would have been entirely avoidable had these two pieces of Microsoft software actually represented network pathnames in a consistent way.
I do hope that this proves to be helpful to anyone else grappling with this particular problem.