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Are you unable to open Microsoft Office files in MacOS Sequoia? Fix Microsoft Word, Excel and Office file associations

Fix Microsoft Office files not opening in MacOS SequoiaFix Microsoft Office files not opening in MacOS Sequoia

Some Mac users have noticed that Microsoft Office files and documents, whether Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations or otherwise, do not open in their intended apps or do not link properly to the relevant Microsoft Office app, after updating their Mac to MacOS Sequoia. To make matters worse, some users report that when they try to open a Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Office file, such as a docx or xls file on the Mac, they may see an alarming message stating that there is a variation “MacOS cannot verify that DocumentName.docx is free of malware”.

Problems opening Microsoft Office files in MacOS Sequoia can be frustrating, but luckily a very simple solution is to use this trick to change the default application that opens a file type on Mac, a tip that has been around for a long time.

How to open Microsoft Office/Word/Excel files in MacOS Sequoia

  1. In the Finder, find a .docx file of a Word document, then press Command+I or choose Get Info from the File menu
  2. Expand the “Open With” section and select “Microsoft Word” as the default file type you want to open the docx files with. Then choose ‘Change all’

    3. Open Microsoft Office files in MacOS SequoiaOpen Microsoft Office files in MacOS Sequoia

  3. Repeat this process as necessary with Excel .xlsx or xls files, Powerpoint .ppt files, and other Microsoft Office files

After you re-associate the file type with the target Microsoft Office app, the files should open as expected.

A few of our readers encountered this problem, and so did I, although the association was with Apple’s Pages and Numbers apps, which isn’t too problematic for me, and the issue has also been discussed on Apple forums and at Tidbits. It’s not clear why some MacOS Sequoia users with Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, 365 are affected, while others are not.

This could be a bug affecting the Microsoft apps or MacOS Sequoia, or it could be intended behavior that’s a bit aggressive on the security front. Either way, associating the files with the right app should solve the problem, and it’s always a good idea to keep your MacOS system software and Mac apps up to date, just in case a bug fix is released.