I don't believe the macro is responsible for any of your documents read-only status - the macro explicitly opens them as read-only (i.e. meaning it can't save changes to them) then explicitly closes them unchanged. Opening as read-only doesn't change their file attributes, though. The only reason I can see for a document becoming read-only is that it was already open - perhaps in an orphaned Word session. Since the macro runs Word in the background, it's possible there is an orphaned Word session from a previous crash. f you close Word then use Task Manager, you should be able to check whether there's a Word process still running. If so, killing it should resolve the problem.