Can not open multiple excel 2003 and excel 2007 files in excel 2010 - message says they may be a security risk and wants to do a scan

Question

We use about 20 excel files to build a consolidated financial statement for our company.  Some of the files were built when  the computers were running 2003 and some when we had 2007.  We are being upgraded to Windows 7 with Office 2010.  In
2007, we would simply highlight all the files in a folder, right click, and open.  Once they had all refreshed for new data, we would close them all.  Now with Excel 2010, we've highlighted all the files, but when we right click, we get a message
that says some files may present an internet security risk.  Then it ask if we want to open anyway.  If we say yes, we get a box that asks us to scan the files.  We've done a scan, but at the end it still doesn't open the files.  If we
say no, it does nothing.  Either way, we're not getting the files open except to open them 1 by 1.  We're not sure how to get rid of this...any suggestions?

Answer 1

In Excel 2010 setting those documents as trusted documents, or adding the folder containing as a trusted location may do the trick for you. There's a full description of what it does here
http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2009/09/28/trusted-documents.aspx but if you go into File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings..., and then Trusted Locations, you'll see the list of currently configured file paths that are considered
trusted on your machine.
At the bottom of that window you can check the option to allow trusted locations on the network (so you can trust the files that I assume are stored on a network location) and then add the location of those files to the list.
Note, this setting is done per machine profile, so if it does the trick for you then each person needing these files would need to do this. Also, keep in mind that by doing this you're removing some of the protections added into Excel, so you should only
go adding locations you know you can trust (not just the root of a network path where anyone and everyone might go saving spreadsheets they've downloaded form the internet).