You see a warning message instead of document text when you open a Word 2003 document in Word 2004 for Mac or in Word 2008 for Mac

When you open a Microsoft Office Word 2003 document in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac or in Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac, instead of the document text, you may see the following warning message: If you click Unprotect on the Tools menu, nothing happens. The warning message is still visible. However, if you save the document after you use the Word for Mac Unprotect feature, the contents of the article are deleted except for the warning message. The file size of the document will reduce to less than 32 kilobytes (KB).

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

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

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

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 Microsoft Web site: