God Mode Causes Win10 Office URL Insert Fail

God Mode is a nickname for a special folder in Windows. God Mode is not built into Windows, and requires some modest effort to create. For instructions about this, see my 2008 blog post right here at WED. But once created, God Mode offers immediate access to 200+ tools otherwise accessible only through Control Panel. It’s handy to have around, and lots of power users put it to work. But alas, I’ve recently learned that God Mode causes Win10 Office URL insert fail on some PCs. In other terms, it makes Office components (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so forth) crash when you insert a hyperlink into one of the related document types (.doc and .docx, .xsl and .xsls, .ppt and .pptx, and so on) while editing. Not good!

Here’s a partial snap of what God Mode looks like in File Explorer.
[Click image for full-sized view]

Fixing God Mode Causes Win10 Office URL Insert Fail

Fortunately, this problem doesn’t afflict all Windows 10 users. Only some of them will ever encounter this problem. But while the fix is easy, it also means doing without God Mode. Yes, that’s right: the only workable fix at present is to delete the folder you must create to put God Mode to work. When it’s deleted, God Mode no longer works. But at least you can paste URLs into Office apps without crashing them!

Thanks to the posters at TenForums. com, who aired this issue in a thread named “MS Office 2016 crash when inserting hyperlink.” Special thanks to user AndreTen, who started the thread and provided the related fix. He also confirmed that some, but not all, Windows 10 PCs are subject to this gotcha. This is one of those kinds of things that will make a small, but immediately happy, minority of readers exclaim: “So THAT’S what it was.” The rest of us should merely keep this in mind for the future should it jump up to bite again. Another possible plus for Win10 that MS probably won’t advertise is AndreTen’s statement. He said that “With Microsoft moving more and more commands from Control Panel to Settings, it’s easier to give up on Gode Mode…” Well said.

[Note Added 4/21]Other fixes for this issue are also emerging, thanks mostly to poster Denis on the same thread. For those with this issue in Outlook, a check on this Microsoft Knowledge Base article is also worthwhile: Hyperlinks are not working in Outlook. Additional threads in this post also explain some helpful and related registry hacks, too (especially threads #3 and #6).