Kai and Torsten,
Thank you very much for your responses. Strangely when I opened Octave this morning, the functionality seems to be working fine now. Last night I restarted my machine several times hoping to resolve the issue but had no luck. I am not sure why it went back to working correctly now. My issue does sound similar to bug#55161; however I am not running through a cloud server. Everything is saved and operating from my local drive.
To answer your questions though if the issue arises again. I am running on Windows 10 Pro, running Octave 5.1.0. I downloaded it from the following link (located through a Coursera course)
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows/
I have not tried to uninstall and reinstall Octave yet. That was going to be my plan of action this morning because we need admin credentials from our IT group to run those operations. Finally, my working directory is just on my local H:drive.
Thank you for the prompt replies and I will let you know if any other issues arise,
Zach