Adobe Acrobat Plugin for Word Grayed out for some documents

[Guest]

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

Word 2016

Windows 10

The plugin is active and enabled in word and for some documents (or with a blank document) the tool bar works and Save As PDF is enabled fine in the file menu.  However some documents gray out these features and I can't tell why.  

[ls_rbls]

You have screenshot of the Check for Issues. Click on it to see if trunning the Accessibility Checker and the Inspect Document wizards can find releveant problems about the certain type of MS Word files that you're trying to convert to PDF.

You can also go to Control Panel, right-click on the Adobe PDF Printer icon to bring the Properties dialogue box. Check if on the settings  of each tab something is disabled or need to be disabled/enabled.

Make sure Adobe Acrobat is also properly installed and updated to latest version.

There was a recent planned update pushed out for Acrobat.

If Acrobat updated, be aware that add-ons and extensions don't update automatically. It may be necessary to uninstall amd reinstall the  Adobe PDF Maker extension in MS Office.

The same would apply for the OS and the MS Office suite.

Windows 10 can also be upgraded/updated to version 1909 for free since last November.

If you haven't applied this update do so.

And last, make sure that Adobe Acrobat is the default PDF handler/owner in Windows 10, not a web browser nor any other third party app.

[Guest]

I've checked the compatability checker as it's only warning is that we cannot convert this document back to .doc as it used to be.  This issue is happening in both the Office 2013 .doc version of this file and the upgraded .docx version.  But it does not ahppen to all the old files, only about 1 in 4 so far that we have seen.  (User was just upgraded to Windows 10 last week)

This is a corp enviroment so we can't control the build of Windows, but no one else in the office is having this issue on the same build for both Windows 10 and Office 365.  Just uninstalled and reisntalled Adobe Acrobat to trobuleshoot this issue, all updates applied as of 2-14. Prior to that I tried uninsstalling and reinstalling just the plugin. Acrobat is the default PDF handler in windows.

I will reach out to the User and check the properties of Adobe PDF Printer in the control panel.

[ls_rbls]

Ok, let me see if I understood correctly.

This greying out of the Adobe PDF toolbar doesn't manifest in computers running the latest Win10 and Office 365, correct?

You've also mentioned about MS Office 2013 and 2016 versions.  Is the user using Office 365 opening files .doc and .docx files that were previously created with Office 2013 and 2016 respectively?

Are these files being shared over a network, let's say, from a mapped network drive, for example?

[Guest]

This is only happening for someone on Windows 10 and Office 16.  The files themselves where all in Office 2013 format as the user just migrated to the new OS and Office.  Updating these files to 2016 format doesn't seem to help.

The files themselves are generally stored on a network drive.  However in part of my testing I moved one of the files that grays out the Adobe toolbar to the desktop and opened it and it did the same thing.  I also tested a "working" file to the same network file path and it continuned to work.

[James31943677hh23]

Try renaming your C:\Users\<userName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\normal.dotm to something else. Then start a new blank Word document to force Word to recreate the normal template. I experienced this problem and this fixed it. It was a corrupted normal.dotm. The Adobe plug-in is associated in some way with normal.dotm. 

[nameofuser · Accepted solution]

I had the same problem, and the above solution (a fresh normal.dotm) fixed it for me. Thanks.