Windows – “Incompatible Office products are installed on your machine” when opening Office documents or browsing OneDrive or SharePoint Site

microsoft-officemicrosoft-office-2013onedrivesharepointwindows 7

I'm running Office 2013 Pro Plus 32-bit (MSI-based) on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. When trying to open an Excel, Word, or PowerPoint documents I get this error message:

Sorry, we can't perform this action. Incompatible Office products are installed on your machine. If you have an administrator, please contact them for help.

After clicking OK the file opens and functions normally.

Further, if I attempt to browse OneDrive or a SharePoint site through Word or Excel the same error is displayed. After clicking OK I can continue browsing the connected service. Unfortunately, removing the services doesn't solve the problem.

How can I fix this?

Additional Details

  • The error is only displayed when opening the first document in the Office program. Once the error has been displayed, I can open other documents and don't get the error.
  • I only get the error when opening documents stored on a mapped network drive. No error is displayed when opening documents stored on my local hard drive.

In the Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft Office Alerts log I found an entry with event ID 300 and Source "Microsoft Office 15 Alerts" that has this text:

Microsoft Excel
Sorry, we can’t perform this action. Incompatible Office products are installed on your machine. If you have an administrator, please contact them for help.
P1: 702089
P2: 15.0.4693.1000
P3:
P4:

My research/Attempted Solutions:

  • I tried deleting my Personal Macro workbook. No change.
  • I found this Microsoft forum post which suggests uninstalling SharePoint Designer 2010, but I don't have that product installed.
  • The forum refers to KB2920798, which I installed today, but I'm able to open my Office files, contrary to the KB's claim that This update provides you an informative message when you cannot open an Office document. I do not have any click-to-run Office products installed.
  • Over the weekend I installed SimCity 3000 Unlimited which is an older game. It installed "MS Access 97 SP2 Runtime. Update: Uninstalling this didn't help.
  • I also installed available Windows Updates this weekend, about 20-30 of them to my recollection.

Best Answer

You need to uninstall the stand-alone Microsoft OneDrive for Business 2013 sync client. [Edit: As noted in the comments, this issue is caused by any version of the stand-alone sync client, not just the Business version.] It looks like this in Add/Remove Programs:
enter image description here

The stand-alone sync client is the Incompatible Office product installed on your machine referred to by the February 10, 2015 update for Office 2013 (KB2920798) update. Your edition of Office 2013 came with its own OneDrive for Business 2013 sync client:

If you have one of the following versions of Office 2013, you already have the OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro) sync client installed:

  • Office Professional Plus 2013
  • Office 365 Enterprise E3
  • Office 365 Midsize Business
  • Office 365 Small Business Premium

This included OneDrive sync client is conflicting with the stand-alone client. As noted in the installation instructions, the stand-alone version is only meant to be installed with Office 2010:

The OneDrive for Business client can be installed side by side with Office 2010....Using OneDrive for Business alongside the 2007 Office system is not a supported scenario.

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