Skip to main content
D
david_7501
Participant
January 30, 2025
Question

Unable to open the document

  • January 30, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 415 views

Hi community,

 

Got a weird bug here.  Whenever me or my team try to convert a Word document generated by Power Automate to a PDF, there is a chance the file will not allow us and we get this error:


Unable to open the document:

<PATH HERE>
Please check to see if you have read permission for the above file.

 

We all have read permission, we can generate the PDF when printing with Adobe PDF while in the document.  Any ideas?

    1 reply

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 30, 2025

    I do not mean to sound rude or anything here, but my first thought is that you not use Power Automate for PDF generation.

    D
    david_7501Author
    Participant
    January 30, 2025

    Oh you're fine.  We are not using Power Automate for PDF generation.  It's taking data and creating Word documents that we were feeding into Adobe Acrobat to manually create the PDF documents ourselves.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 30, 2025

    OK, sorry I misunderstood your situation. Does anything like this happen to any regular (non-Power Automate generated) Word document?

     

    Regardless, have you tried contacting Microsoft about this? It seems that there's something in their product that's causing the issue. Think of putting really bad gasoline in your car and having the car die on you. It's not the car that is the problem. 

     

    Confession: I've never heard of Power Automate and had to look it up. You might want to try using "Save as PDF" instead of "Save as Adobe PDF." The former is using its own (Microsoft's) PDF generation engine as opposed to using Adobe's PDF engine. [For the record, Apple has their own as well.] Back in the 80s & 90s, Microsoft was intentionally doing things like this all the time to make their competitors look bad.) Hopefully, I'm completely wrong and overly suspicious, and this is just a bug that you've found. 

     

    Keep letting me know what's happening, thanks!

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices