You see the "Permission for this workbook is currently restricted" warning message instead of the workbook cells when you open an Excel 2003 workbook in Excel 2004 for Mac

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SYMPTOMS

When you open a Microsoft Office Excel 2003 workbook in Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac, instead of the workbook cells you may see the following warning message:

Permission for this workbook is currently restricted. This workbook can only be opened by using Microsoft Office 2003 or later. You can request the author of the workbook to send a copy that can be read using the Rights Management Add-on for Internet Explorer.

Learn more about documents with restricted permission

If you click Unprotect on the Tools menu, nothing happens. You can still see the warning message. However, if you save the document after you use the Excel 2004 for Mac Unprotect feature, the contents of the article are deleted except for the warning message. The file size of the document is reduced to less than 32 kilobytes (KB).

Opening the unprotected document by using Excel 2003 will not restore the document.

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CAUSE

This problem occurs because Office 2004 for Mac does not support the Information Rights Management (IRM) feature of Microsoft Office 2003. When you try to unprotect the workbook, the IRM-protected text is deleted because this is the expected behavior for IRM-protected workbooks.

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STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the"Applies to" section.

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MORE INFORMATION

Currently, there is no Rights Management Add-on for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2.x for Mac OS X or for the Safari Web browser.

For more information about Information Rights Management for Office 2003, visit the following Web site:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010397891033.aspx (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010397891033.aspx)

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