Captivate Classic Publish/Print to Word Broken

We are seeing this same issue as well, and it started suddenly company-wide.

Environment:

• Adobe Captivate Classic 11.8.4

• Microsoft 365 Apps / Word installed

• Windows 11

Error:
“Publish to MS Word failed. Retry after ensuring that:

• The document is not open.

• You have installed Microsoft Word.”

This happens from Captivate Classic using File > Print to Microsoft Word. We tested all available Word output types, including Handouts, Storyboard, Step by Step, and Lesson, and they all fail with the same message.

Things we have already tested:

• Word is installed and opens normally.

• Word COM automation works from PowerShell.

• Word VBA editor opens.

• Captivate’s PrintOutput template files are present:

  • Adobe Captivate.dot

  • Lesson.doc

  • Step by Step.doc

  • Storyboard.doc

• Word can open those templates directly.

• Word can create a new document from Adobe Captivate.dot and save it successfully.

• Exporting to a local folder such as C:\Temp\CaptivateTest still fails.

• Running Captivate as local admin still fails.

• Disabling the Acrobat PDFMaker Word COM add-in did not fix it.

• Rolling Microsoft 365 Apps back from build 16.0.20026.20168 to 16.0.19929.20172 did not fix it.

• This is occurring across multiple company computers, not just one user profile or one workstation.

At this point it looks like Captivate Classic’s Print/Publish to Word workflow may be broken outside of a normal Word installation issue. Interested to know if anyone else has found a workaround or if Adobe can confirm whether this is a known regression in the current Captivate Classic build.