Well you don’t go into much detail of what exactly is stopping this, but my suspicion would be the autosandbox.

Old versions of MS Excel and MS Word weren’t digitally signed and because of their old status they won’t be found that frequently.

I have even older versions of MS Excel and MS Word than you and I just excluded them.
AvastUI > File System Shield > Settings > AutoSandbox and add them to the exclusions, see image (click to expand).