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Excel and Word tip to enable data connections
Microsoft Office products such as Excel and Word have safeguards added that are designed to protect your data from malicious harm. One of these protections is defaulted to not allow you to update your spreadsheets used to pull information from other programs without additional steps. You’ll know when this is the case when you see a message such as “Security Warning Data connections have been disabled at the top of the Excel spreadsheet alongside a button “Options” or “Enable Editing”.
To enable the data connection temporarily so that you can continue with your work, simply click on the ”Options” or “Enable Editing” button and select “Enable this content” option.
If you feel that you only open safe data files and want to enable the content automatically, follow these steps MS Excel:
- Activate Microsoft Excel, click on File on the top left
- Choose Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings
- On the left choose External Content, then “Enable all Data Connections (not recommended)”
- Select OK, then exit and reopen your spreadsheet. The “Data Connections have been disabled” message should no longer display.
Note: This will also work for Microsoft Word and other MS programs.
