How to Solve MS Office VBA Compile Error UserAuthentication

This is such a persistent issue that hopefully will die down soon. In a corporate world where there are so many legacy systems though, and this comes up more than we want to admit.

This happened in one corporation that has one department relies on various macro-enabled Microsoft Word documents to process requests. One morning, one processor encountered a Visual Basic for Applications error in one of their Microsoft Word forms.

Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications
Compile error in hidden module: UserAuthentication.
This error commonly occurs when code is incompatible with
the version, platform, or architecture of this application. Click
"Help" for information on how to correct this error.

When you encounter this, right away check both the MS Word doc (or docx) file and what version of MS Words is used to open the file.

As the error indicates, the keyword here is code incompatible with the version… of this application.

In our case, we did not have to check their document library since we know their forms were really old. So we just needed to check their MS Office version.

If you use MS Word 2016 or later, just go to File, Account and click on About Word and check on the header. In this very specific case, the end user used a 64-bit version of MS Word to open the old document and that was the cause of error.

Once we have this information, there were two options that the client could take. Either, the forms need to be rewritten or the user’s MS Word need to be downgraded to a 32-bit version. The latter option of course is easier and faster.

The client opted for a downgrade to resolve the issue.