Microsoft Word Autosave fails: File contains ActiveX controls — RESOLVED

Ebeb
1 min readAug 25, 2023

Sometime Microsoft Office 365 is unable to set Autosave to ON as it gives an error - Office is unable to save this file automatically because it contains ActiveX controls. Please remove those ActiveX controls.

The best way I found to resolve this issue so that Office 365 Word will be able to set Autosave to ON is as follows.

  1. First download the Word document to a local disk and then upload to Google Drive.
  2. In Google Drive convert the file to Google Docs format using the menu option.
  3. Open the Google doc and then in File->Download->OpenDocument(.odt) format and save it as .odt file in your local disk
  4. Open the .odt file in Office 365 Word and upload to OneDrive.
  5. Now open the Onedrive file in Microsoft Office 365 and it will allow you to Autosave the Word document.

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