Remove – CHECK OUT REQUIRED banner from office documents.

Hi hive mind,

My issue appears to be wide spread across the SharePoint community but my Googling skills are letting me down on this one.

When opening an office document from SharePoint where the library setting “Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?” is set to Yes there is a yellow banner across the top of the document saying “CHECK OUT REQUIRED To modify this server workbook, you must check it out.” and a handy check out button.

The problem is, our site collection is for consumption and most of our staff have read access to these documents.

When someone opens the document in the client app then click the check out button (we have word forms that need to be completed and haven’t moved these into a better form solution yet) they’re prompted for their credentials.  After the user enters their credentials 3 times they are given an error message saying “We couldn’t check out the file. Click OK to open a read-only copy.”

Is there a way to hide the yellow check out bar if the user doesn’t have permissions?  This will hopefully stop the Service Desk calls we get regarding this.

Thanks in advance,

SPD