MS Word 2016 – Unable to open… Cannot download the information you requested

Issue

MS Office 2016 shows the error below when trying to open some hyperlinks in Word documents.

Unable to open https://dropbox.com/…… Cannot download the information you requested.

Resolution

The issue doesn’t affect the latest versions of MS Office 365. To resolve this for MS Office 2016 / 2019, make the following registry change:

• Open regedit.exe
• Navigate to:
  • In case of 32bit version of MS Office on 64bit Windows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Internet
  • Otherwise: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Internet
  • If any of the keys in the above path don’t exist, create them.
• Create a DWORD entry with the name: ForceShellExecute and the value of 1
  

November 2022
Windows 10 Pro
MS Office 2016