Excel won't save file. 3

[klownska]

Hi I have a user who is trying to save an excel document she has been working on all day, the file is large but she works on it weekly, and it is no bigger than last week. We are unable to save, save as, or even send to. When trying to save it will sit there for ages and eventually pop up a box saying document not saved. When trying to send as attachment nothing happens at all. I have attempted to save as a different name and it will change the name on the top of the page, when sending as attachment it says saving temporary file as it is waiting. I know excel saves temp files in case you have a system crash, but where does it save it's temp files to? I have searched the drive but there is no mention of any of the filenames I have tried to save it as.

 

[koresnordic]

Temp files are not always stored as the same name as the original document, but usually have a ".tmp" extenstion. Try searching for this. Also are you trying to save over a network or local?



Graham

 

[xlbo]

This generally happens when a network connection is lost very briefly - excel "forgets" the link to the network. My standard workaround is to select all sheets in the workbook, right click on one of them. Choose Move / Copy. Select "New Workbook" and Copy. This creates a new workbook with all the sheets from the old one. Close the old one and save the new one with the same name as the old one and all should be well again

Rgds, Geoff
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[ChasM01]

Does she have enough disk space on the drive to save the file? She needs to have at least as much free space on her disk as the new file size is. DOS/Windows does not initially overlay the file when you do a save, it creates a temp file and then saves the temp file with the old name or a new name. Sounds to me that she doesn't have the disk space for the temp file.

 

[klownska]

Trying to save to the network didn't work, trying to save locally didn't work, this is not a disk space issue, that was the first thing I checked.

 

[Pekka]

Have you any macros? Sometimes errors in macros can do this. Try to debug your project.
Can you copy and paste your worksheet to attachment?

 

[xlbo]

Did either of you read my post ? The symptoms you describe are exactly those of a very short network disconnection - unless of course there is no network / this is happening to all the user's files - in which case ignore me ;-)

Rgds, Geoff
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[koresnordic]

did you try what xlbo suggested? If so, what problems occured that meant this didn't work?



Graham

 

[geagle]

What version of Windows and what version of Excel? What exactly is the error message from Excel? I had a similiar problem I think. Windows 2000 and Excel XP (2002). Final resolution was to apply latest Service Packs to both and that took care of problem. Could not find where my particular problem was documented anyplace and only happened in the one particular office that had the above combination of Windows OS and Excel versions. I put SP3 on W2000 and SP2 on Office XP. I'm not sure what fixed the problem, because I did them both at the same time after work. Next day all the users were OK. We were getting this problem constantly in only one office. These users were attaching to a Novell 5.0 server and a W2000 server but I don't think that had anything to do with the fix.

 

[klownska]

W2k pro office 2000 pro w2kserver based network no novell, linux etc. This is related to one user only the exact message was as I said, "document not saved" I no longer need to fix the problem but I would like to find a fix for future reference. I am pretty sure that the user can now save from excel but I am going on the fact that she hasn't come and asked me anything since the original problem.

 

[xlbo]

If it only happened once and to one user then I'm pretty sure it was what I described in an earlier post - a very short network disconnection

Rgds, Geoff
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[klownska]

Nah dude, It wasn't a network issue and it definitely wasn't very short. I could see the network shares just fine, and I had the user keep her machine turned on and excel opened for several hours, While I looked for a fix. I appreciate your help but if it was a network disruption I would'nt have bothered to follow up. Also she wasn't able to save the file to her hard drive either which rules out a network issue.

 

[xlbo]

Actually - that happens as well - I'm not saying your network went down - I'm saying that excel managed to temporarily lose it's memory of the connection. When it does this, it causes the file to not be able to be saved to a network OR the hard drive. Trust me - I've only ever seen that "Document Not Saved" message in this instance and the workaround is as I've described above

Rgds, Geoff
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[GlennUK]

xlbo is right!

Once you received that message you can't save the file ANYWHERE else. I've had this happen dozens of times, and it's really annoying.

Glenn.

 

[klownska]

O.K. then, so there is no way for me to prevent this occuring again, which is what I was after, rather than a workaround, this is basically what my boss told me, but when I told this to the user she said nah theres to many sheets, it will not work blah blah blah. I figured it was easier to see if there was another fix than to convince her to do it.I must say I admire your persistance(xlbo)thankyou.

 

[xlbo]

No probs but it really doesn't take long to copy all the sheets
Select sheet1's tab
Use the navigator buttons in the bottom left to move to the last sheet
Hold down shift
Select the last sheet's tab. Now all the sheets are selected. Right click on any of them
Choose Move / Copy
Tick Copy and select New Workbook from the list
That is all

Rgds, Geoff
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[JVerdaasdonk]

Hi Guys,

How big is this file(mb's)
How many sheets are in there?

When you're temp file is full, Excel is not able to save the document! (just an idea)

Excel does have limits in his specifications, but almost all off theme are related to RAM & HD-space!

Something helpfull overe here?

See Yah
Joost Verdaasdonk

 

[yert33]

I have the same dang problem on one of my networks. NT servers, Excel 97, saving to a network drive.

Looking at micro$oft support, they suggest adding a registry key for "network resiliency" but I'm not sure it applies to Office 97 products as their example is for Office2000.

See here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;230164

But (typical of M$) they add a caveat at the bottom that says: You will still receive the first error message listed in the "Symptoms" section when you attempt to save a file after you lose network connectivity. However, you will be able to save your file to another location.

Anyone else have experience with this registry key?

 

[geagle]

I had another IT person tell me what they did for this problem:
They found out it was a time issue. The temp file that Excel creates is timestamped with current PC time. They said their PC's time was not synced with the network and the PC time was faster than the network, so when the actual save was done, Excel would not save the file. Re-setting the time or syncing solved the problem.

This was not the solution to this same problem in our case.

Updating the OS (Windows 2000) and Excel (2002) to latest service packs and/or releases solved our problem. It only happened in Excel.

 

[Chrissirhc]

So if I understandly correctly once a theres a temporary loss of connection whilst saving, in a way the excel sessions becomes corrupt in that you have no chance of saving that file? So that is why I cannot save to c:\temp or anywhere else after the first occurence of the error message?

And Microsoft have no fix? Or there is no other fix? (The network resiliency thing has already been set in the registry). The copying all sheets it not really liked by the users.

Thanks in advance for any answers

Chris