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I am assembling a master document out of existing documents. &nbsp;I successfully included a subdocument, which then appeared as part of the master. &nbsp;I made unrelated changes to the master, saved it and exited word.<br />
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When I attempted to reload the master, I got the message: &quot;At least one subdocument or the master document is locked&quot;. &nbsp;However both master and subdocument are unprorected (&quot;unrestricted access&quot; in the &quot;Protect Document&quot; section of hte development tab.<br />
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In addition, the buttons Create, Insert etc in the &quot;Show Documents&quot; section of the Outlining tab are grayed out.<br />
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This happened once before. &nbsp;Closing and restarting word fixed the problem, but not this time. &nbsp;How do I get out of it?
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I am assembling a master document out of existing documents.  I successfully included a subdocument, which then appeared as part of the master.  I made unrelated changes to the master, saved it and exited word.

When I attempted to reload the master, I got the message: "At least one subdocument or the master document is locked".  However both master and subdocument are unprorected ("unrestricted access" in the "Protect Document" section of hte development tab.

In addition, the buttons Create, Insert etc in the "Show Documents" section of the Outlining tab are grayed out.

This happened once before.  Closing and restarting word fixed the problem, but not this time.  How do I get out of it?

Error Message: at least one subdocument or the master document is locked

Microsoft Word is a commercial document editing program that is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It features numerous text-editing tools for creating richly formatted documents, along with tools for the use of macros in Word documents. Word's native file formats are denoted either by a .doc or .docx file extension. Plugins permitting the Windows versions of Word to read and write formats it does not natively support, such as the OpenDocument format (ODF) are available. Word can import and display images in common bitmap formats such as JPG and GIF. It can also be used to create and display simple line-art.

Microsoft Word

Office Productivity refers both to the act of being productive and efficient in an office or professional environment, as well as the software applications used to "produce" information. This includes the development of professional skills, creating work processes, and almost any program used to create or modify a document, image, audio or video clip. However, business application suites such as Microsoft Office, which include word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs, are typically called productivity software, as contrasted with a "utility program," such as a file manager, which is used to organize files and folders on the computer. Many office- and business-oriented groups of programs are organized into suites.

Office Productivity

A word processor is an electronic device or computer software application that performs the task of composition, editing, formatting, and sometimes printing of documents. Most modern word processors use a graphical user interface, and most are powerful systems consisting of one or more programs that can produce any arbitrary combination of images, graphics and text, the latter handled with type-setting capability. Typical features of a modern word processor include font application, spell checking, grammar checking, a built-in thesaurus, automatic text correction, Web integration, and HTML exporting, among others.