This operation has been cancelled… after clicking a link in Word 2010

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3 min. reading

I had the issue of seeing this nasty error message each time when I clicked any link in my Microsoft Word:

I was struggling with this issue in both Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Word 2013.

I have correctly identified that this problem is related to me removing Internet Explorer 11 from my Windows 10 (an optional feature in this version of Windows). However, while bringing it back resolved this problem for my office computer with Office 2013, I was forced to do a little bit more to resolve this issue on my home computer with Office 2013.

I dig through a whole bunch of page, some of them 10+ years old. You will find a list of them in the end of this article. However, the only post that actually helped me was “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions” article by Slipstick Systems.

For Office 2013, as said in this section of above mentioned article, all that I had to do was to reinstate Internet Explorer 11. For Office 2010 a bit more tweaking up in Windows Registry was needed.

You will need to either import a prepared .reg file or do the tweaks by yourself:

  1. Run Registry Editor.
  2. Navigate (copy-paste to address bar) to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html.
  3. Double click the (Default) item in the right pane to start editing it.
  4. Make sure that its value is set to htmlfile.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 for .htm, .shtml, .xht, .xhtml and .xhtm keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.
  6. You need to restart Windows, after you done, for the change to take effect.

Yes, I haven’t uninstalled Chrome or Firefox. I have only removed Internet Explorer 11. However, I am intentionally providing a solution that is mentioned for removing Chrome scenario. That was the only one that worked in my case.

Let me write it again, because initially I forgot about this and I saw a lot of comments proving that other are also easily forgetting about this — You need to restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Here are the all the pages I visited, prior to Slipstick Systems, when trying to resolve this issue:

None of them helped in my case.

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