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Unable to open the document

Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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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?

TOPICS
Create PDFs , Edit and convert PDFs , Modern Acrobat , PDF

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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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.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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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!

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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It's only been Word documents generated by Power Automate and it's been inconsistent on which Word documents have this issue and which do not.

We haven't tried contacting Microsoft.  I thought it would be an Adobe Acrobat issue since we can open the document and use "Save as PDF" as well as "Save as Adobe PDF" without issue.  It's only when using Acrobat as the converter that we run into this problem.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

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Yes, I do understand. However, the Word documents have been generated by the Power Automate.

 

Can you surmise any relationship between documents that fail and those that do not fail?

 

Maybe 20-25 years ago, I had a PDF that would not print from Acrobat. I had no problem printing this document from Apple's Preview (Preview is Apple's PDF viewer). I contacted Adobe and told them about this bug. They responded that Acrobat did not create the PDF, so it was not their responsibility. The document was (apparently) created wrong (this gets back to the Microsoft PDF creator, Apple's PDF creator, and all of the other PDF creator software out there), and they do not have the time to fix mistakes that other PDF creator software companies make. My guess is that Power Automate is leaving and/or creating some code that is causing Acrobat to fail in PDF creation. If you sent me a document that fails, I would not know where to begin to look for such a built-in fail or know it if I were to see it. Please keep in mind that I've never even heard of Power Automate until now, so I may be completely wrong. At this point, I'm going to bow out and hope that someone with any knowledge or experience step in to see if they have any support to provide.

 

I'm sorry, good luck.

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